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Untechnical    Addresses 

ON 

Technical   Subjects 


BY 

JAMES   DOUGLAS,  LL.D. 


SECOND  EDITION  WITH  ADDITIONAL  ADDRESSES 


NEW  YORK 

JOHN  WILEY  &  SONS 

LONDON  :  CHAPMAN  &  HALL,  LIMITED 

1908 


Copyright.  1904,  1908, 

BY 

JAMES  DOUGLAS 


a  hr  €>rirnt ifir  $rra« 
fiobrrt  Drumnuinh  anil  Comjm 
Nrm  fork 


3)74 


PREFACE 


IN  reprinting  the  following  addresses,  omissions 
are  made  occasionally  to  avoid  repetition.  In  other 
cases,  in  order  to  bring  the  information  up  to  date 
or  to  amplify  the  subject,  considerable  additions 
are  interpolated;  but  these,  where  they  occur,  are 

enclosed  in  brackets. 

iii 


CONTENTS 


~>  PAGE 

\      THE  CHARACTERISTICS  AND  CONDITIONS  OP  THE  TECH- 

.  NICAL  PROGRESS  OF  THE  NINETEENTH  CENTURY  ....        1 

^      THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  AMERICAN  MINING  AND  METAL- 

\jW        LURGY,  AND  THE    EQUIPMENTS   OF   A  TRAINING  SCHOOL      39 

^      WASTES  IN  MINING  AND  METALLURGY 60 

^j       SOME    OF   THE    RELATIONS    OF   RAILWAY    TRANSPOR- 

^  TATION     IN      THE     UNITED     STATES     TO     MlNING     AND 

f\  METALLURGY 85 

SECRECY  IN  THE  ARTS , .   127 


The    Characteristics    and    Conditions   of   the 

Technical  Progress  of  the  Nineteenth 

Century 

(Presidential  Address  at  the  California  meeting,  September,  1899) 

AT  this,  the  last  meeting  of  our  Institute  for 
the  last  year  of  the  century,  it  is  appropriate  that 
we  should  look  back  at  the  past. 

To  review  the  century's  progress  in  the  exact 
sciences  and  the  resulting  arts,  that  fall  within 
the  scope  of  our  labors,  is  beyond  my  ability. 
But  I  wish  to  draw  your  attention  to  some  phases 
of  that  progress  which  are  almost  as  important, 
though  they  be  within  the. zone  of  sociology — a 
science  which  touches  at  many  points  the  do- 
main of  applied  technology. 

One  of  these  is  suggested  by  the  library  of  tech- 
nical literature  which  this  century  has  produced 
— not  the  least  important  contribution  to  which 
is  our  own  Transactions.  The  nineteenth  century 
has  witnessed  the  beneficial  spread  of  democracy 


2       Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

in  politics.  Under  the  impulse,  to  no  small 
degree,  of  the  same  spirit,  there  has  grown  up  a 
brotherhood  of  fellow-workers  and  a  sense  of 
fellow-ownership  in  the  secrets  of  nature.  Though 
the  Patent  Office  has  assumed  such  proportions 
as  to  have  become  a  source  of  national  revenue, 
and  a  multitude  of  inventors,  great  and  small, 
are  seeking  through  its  agency  to  secure  some 
pecuniary  profit  from  their  devices,  there  is  even 
greater  eagerness  among  both  interested  and  dis- 
interested workers  in  the  field  of  technology  to 
publish  their  observations,  and  even  their  dis- 
coveries, and  to  give  them  to  the  world  without 
remuneration.  The  motives  influencing  the  great 
body  of  writers  who,  without  any  pay,  use  the 
technical  journals  and  such  media  of  communi- 
cation as  our  Transactions,  in  order  to  give  to  the 
brethren  of  their  craft  the  results  of  their  often 
dearly-earned  experiences,  are  various  and  com- 
plicated. But,  in  the  majority  of  cases,  the  im- 
pulse originates  in  the  desire  for  reciprocity,  and 
in  the  hope  that  others  will  tell  what  they  know, 
in  return  for  what  we  ourselves  communicate, 
and  that  therefore  we  shall  learn  at  least  as  much 
as  we  can  teach. 


Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century     3 

The  spread  of  this  healthy  desire  for  liberal 
intercourse  is  assisted  by  the  increase  of  means 
and  opportunities  for  its  gratification.  Meetings 
such  as  this,  for  the  personal  interchange  of 
thoughts  and  experiences,  after  a  journey  of 
4000  miles,  are  possible  only  through  the  aid  of 
railroads.  The  dissemination  of  our  Transac- 
tions and  of  the  great  bulk  of  technical  literature 
can  be  effected  only  through  a  government  Post 
Office,  working  for  the  public  good,  and,  in  some 
of  its  departments,  at  unprofitable  rates.  These 
agencies  have  been  the  product  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  and  only  under  their  stimulus  and  through 
their  machinery  could  such  efforts  be  rendered 
practicable  as  technical  men,  the  world  over,  are 
making  for  the  furtherance  of  their  common  pur- 
suits, interests  and  aims.  Attribute  the  move- 
ment to  what  cause  we  may,  I  think  it  is  fair  to 
claim  as  one  of  the  glories  of  the  vanishing  cen- 
tury the  development  of  the  spirit  of  open-minded- 
ness  and  fraternal  helpfulness,  even  in  such  self- 
seeking  pursuits  as  those  in  which  we  are  engaged. 
I  use  the  word  "development"  advisedly;  for  I 
am  far  from  admitting  that  progress  in  this  direc-  \ 
tion  has  reached  the  consummation  of  beneficial 


4      Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

intercommunication  which  the  twentieth  century 
will  witness,  and  which  will  aid  mightily  in  the 
further  advancement  of  science,  as  well  as  of  art. 

To-day,  more  than  ever,  technical  experience 
is  not  only  more  freely  discussed  and  disseminated 
than  ever  before,  but  the  results  of  that  experience, 
carried  into  actual  practice,  are  more  unreserv- 
edly than  ever  thrown  open  to  technical  inspec- 
tion. The  proof  of  this  we,  visiting  members 
in  attendance  at  this  meeting,  have  experienced 
at  every  step  of  our  journey.  There  are  few  great 
metallurgical  works  in  this  country,  entrance  to 
which  is  refused  to  a  visitor  who  has  any  real 
right  to  ask  for  admission.*  In  Europe,  even, 
where  old  conservative  practices  are  more  endur- 
ing than  here,  the  barrier  of  exclusiveness  is 
being  rapidly  broken  down.  As  a  rule,  those 
establishments  whose  doors  are  most  sedulously 
closed  are  those  least  worth  studying,  except  as 
technical  anachronisms. 

Moreover,  I  think  it  may  be  accepted  as  a  fact 


*  This  observation  does  not  apply  in  full  force  to  chemical 
manufactories,  where  there  are  supposed  to  be  more  secret 
processes  worked  behind-doore  than  in  any  other  branch  of 
technology. 


Technical  Progress  of  the  19th  Century     5 

that  those  branches,  especially  of  metallurgy, 
which  have  made  most  progress,  are  those  in 
which  least  secrecy  and  reserve  have  been  prac- 
ticed. No  art  has  made  such  marvellous  strides 
as  the  manufacture  of  iron  and  steel.  Speaking 
from  my  own  experience,  I  may  say  that  I  have 
never  been  refused  admission  to  any  iron-  or 
steel-works  on  either  side  of  the  Atlantic,  not 
even  the  works  of  Mr.  Frederick  Krupp,  at  Essen. 
But  though  iron-masters  abroad  may  freely  throw 
open  their  doors,  our  own  American  iron-mas- 
ters are  even  more  liberal  in  communicating  their 
plans  and  methods.  Managers  from  England, 
smarting  under  American  competition,  who  have 
come  to  this  country  to  visit  our  furnaces  and 
rolling-mills,  with  the  avowed  object  of  borrowing 
their  plans,  have  expressed  to  me  the  greatest  won- 
der and  admiration  at  the  frankness  with  which 
they  are  allowed  to  study  the  great  works  which 
have  demoralized  prices  the  world  over. 

Not  only  do  the  iron-  and  steel-workers  of 
every  land  bid  their  rivals  enter  and  view  the 
titanic  feats,  which  each  vies  with  his  neighbors 
in  performing: — they  seem  to  take  delight  in 
telling  their  very  secrets.  Certainly  no  special 


8       Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

which  practice  it  on  a  large  scale  in  this  country 
and  Europe  have  acquired,  only  after  much  trouble 
and  serious  expense,  the  experience  which  en- 
ables them  to  turn  out  copper  of  invariable  quality 
with  almost  absolute  certainty.  After  spending 
time,  labor  and  money  in  overcoming  the  diffi- 
culties which  mysteriously  and  unexpectedly 
turn  up,  the  owner  of  a  copper  refinery  deems 
it  unbusinesslike  to  divulge  the  solution  of  these 
problems,  and  thus  place  his  rival's  works  on 
equal  footing  with  his  own.  But,  in  reality,  his 
rivals  have  all  been  battling  with  exactly  the 
same  foes,  and  most  of  them  have  been  victo- 
rious. The  result,  therefore,  of  a  mistaken  reti- 
cence is,  that  each  of  the  works  has  had  to  ex- 
pend, in  surmounting  exactly  the  same  obsta- 
cles, six  or  seven  times  more  mpney  and  energy 
than  if  all  had  been  willing  to  exchange  expe- 
riences. There  is  very  little  to  choose  between 
one  brand  of  electrolytic  copper  and  another. 
All  are  good;  and  all  have  been  brought  to  the 
present  high  standard  by  separate  labor  and 
separate  series  of  experiments,  in  separate  es- 
tablishments; whereas,  had  there  been  co-opera- 
tion on  points  of  purely  technical  manipulation, 


Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century     9 

the  same  results  would  have  been  attained  with 
an  immeasurable  saving  of  time,  mental  wear 
and  tear,  and  financial  expenditure.  It  is  diffi- 
cult for  a  skilful  manufacturer  to  appreciate  and 
admit  this.  But  that  a  truer  appreciation  of  the 
value  of  the  higher  principle  of  co-operation  has 
taken  possession  of  our  copper  refiners  is  evinced 
by  the  publication  of  such  a  paper  as  that  of 
Mr.  Keller,  the  Chemist  of  the  Baltimore  Copper 
Co.,  in  the  last  volume  of  the  Mineral  Industry. 

I  have  used  the  above  instance,  drawn  from 
copper-metallurgy,  as  an  illustration  of  the  waste- 
ful effects  of  secrecy,  and  because  it  stands  out 
in  such  a  glaring  contrast  to  the  nobler  practice 
of  mutual  helpfulness,  which  has  been  one  of  the 
most  potent  forces  in  raising  all  manufacturing, 
but  especially  that  of  iron  and  steel,  to  the  ex- 
alted position  it  has  attained  during  the  latter 
half  of  the  century  with  which  we  are  regretfully 
parting. 

As  time  goes  on,  and  a  generous  dissemination 
of  personal  knowledge,  even  if  it  be  not  strictly 
practical,  becomes  the  rule  and  not  the  excep- 
tion, it  will  be  discovered  that,  after  all,,  success 
in  manufacturing  will  depend  as  much  on  the 


8       Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

which  practice  it  on  a  large  scale  in  this  country 
and  Europe  have  acquired,  only  after  much  trouble 
and  serious  expense,  the  experience  which  en- 
ables  them  to  turn  out  copper  of  invariable  quality 
with  almost  absolute  certainty.  After  spending 
time,  labor  and  money  in  overcoming  the  diffi- 
culties which  mysteriously  and  unexpectedly 
turn  up,  the  owner  of  a  copper  refinery  deems 
it  unbusinesslike  to  divulge  the  solution  of  these 
problems,  and  thus  place  his  rival's  works  on 
equal  footing  with  his  own.  But,  in  reality,  his 
rivals  have  all  been  battling  with  exactly  the 
same  foes,  and  most  of  them  have  been  victo- 
rious. The  result,  therefore,  of  a  mistaken  reti- 
cence is,  that  each  of  the  works  has  had  to  ex- 
pend, in  surmounting  exactly  the  same  obsta- 
cles, six  or  seven  times  more  money  and  energy 
than  if  all  had  been  willing  to  exchange  expe- 
riences. There  is  very  little  to  choose  between 
one  brand  of  electrolytic  copper  and  another. 
All  are  good;  and  all  have  been  brought  to  the 
present  high  standard  by  separate  labor  and 
separate  series  of  experiments,  in  separate  es- 
tablishments; whereas,  had  there  been  co-opera- 
tion on  points  of  purely  technical  manipulation, 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century     9 


the  same  results  would  have  been  attained  with 
an  immeasurable  saving  of  time,  mental  wear 
and  tear,  and  financial  expenditure.  It  is  diffi- 
cult for  a  skilful  manufacturer  to  appreciate  and 
admit  this.  But  that  a  truer  appreciation  of  the 
value  of  the  higher  principle  of  co-operation  has 
taken  possession  of  our  copper  refiners  is  evinced 
by  the  publication  of  such  a  paper  as  that  of 
Mr.  Keller,  the  Chemist  of  the  Baltimore  Copper 
Co.,  in  the  last  volume  of  the  Mineral  Industry. 

I  have  used  the  above  instance,  drawn  from 
copper-metallurgy,  as  an  illustration  of  the  waste- 
ful effects  of  secrecy,  and  because  it  stands  out 
in  such  a  glaring  contrast  to  the  nobler  practice 
of  mutual  helpfulness,  which  has  been  one  of  the 
most  potent  forces  in  raising  all  manufacturing, 
but  especially  that  of  iron  and  steel,  to  the  ex- 
alted position  it  has  attained  during  the  latter 
half  of  the  century  with  which  we  are  regretfully 
parting. 

As  time  goes  on,  and  a  generous  dissemination 
of  personal  knowledge,  even  if  it  be  not  strictly 
practical,  becomes  the  rule  and  not  the  excep- 
tion, it  will  be  discovered  that,  after  all,  success 
in  manufacturing  will  depend  as  much  on  the 


lo     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

personal  energy  and  skill  with  which  the  knowl- 
edge is  applied  as  on  the  possession  of  the  knowl- 
edge itself. 

Whether  we  will  or  not,  secrecy,  as  a  business 
method,  is  becoming  almost  obsolete  under  the 
prying  scrutiny  of  the  press  and  the  telegraph. 
The  old  rules  of  business,  dependent  on  reserve 
and  on  news  secured  in  advance  of  one's  neigh- 
bor, have  given  place  to  new  methods.  The 
chronicle  of  the  world's  doings  is  at  the  disposal 
of  any  one  for  a  few  cents,  every  morning  of  the 
year.  But  a  man  of  business  genius  draws  from 
it  conclusions  very  different  from  those  of  his 
less  imaginative  or  less  enterprising  rival.  Both 
men  may  possess,  as  stock  in  trade,  the  same 
facts,  but  the  abler  man  makes  successful  use  of 
them.  His  correct  and  far-sighted  deductions 
lead  him  to  adopt  a  policy  and  pursue  a  course 
of  action  as  different  from  those  of  his  sluggish 
competitor  as  if  he  had  himself  possessed  special 
sources  of  information. 

And  so  it  is  in  the  practice  of  our  peculiar  arts. 
The  personal  element  determines  the  success  of 
one  man  and  the  failure  of  another,  though  both 
start  out  with  the  same  store  of  facts.  Neverthe- 


Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century  n 

less,  the  more  facts  he  has,  the  more  rapid  will 
be  the  rise  of  the  man  of  genius,  while  the  pace 
of  the  other  will  certainly  not  be  retarded.  The 
man  of  genius,  therefore,  need  not  grudge  the 
communications  of  his  facts  to  his  less  progressive 
competitor,  provided  he  learns,  in  exchange,  what 
few  facts  his  slower  neighbor  may  have  picked 
up  by  the  way. 

While  all  must  admit  that  the  world's  rapid 
advance  in  material  well-being  has  been  due  to 
the  dissemination  of  knowledge,  and  that  this 
can  be  effected  only  by  the  breaking  down  of  the 
barriers  of  secrecy,  some  of  our  brethren  have 
yet  to  be  persuaded  that  there  are  few,  if  any, 
limitations  to  be  set  to  this  universal  law.  Un- 
fortunately, many  barricades,  raised  by  mistaken 
selfishness,  are  still  to  be  stormed  and  demolished. 
But  the  coming  century  will  in  this  respect  carry 
forward  the  work  of  the  receding  age,  whether 
we  shall  see  its  accomplishment  or  not.  At  any 
rate,  we  may  congratulate  ourselves  that  socie- 
ties such  as  ours  have  aided  to  further  so  good 
a  cause,  not  only  as  media  of  communication, 
but  also  as  sources  of  influence — for  the  most  con- 
firmed secret-keeper  cannot  benefit  by  the  candid 


12     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

revelations  of  his  rival  without  some  compunc- 
tion; and,  sooner  or  later,  reform  follows  re- 
pentance. It  is,  therefore,  not  presumptuous 
to  hope  that,  as  the  scientific  temper  more  and 
more  permeates  the  habits  of  our  technical  workers, 
the  old  fashion  of  relying  on  secrets  for  success 
will  be  replaced  by  the  truer  method  of  generous 
giving  and  thankful  receptivity. 

At  present  the  world's  acquisitions  in  pure, 
and,  to  a  great  extent,  in  applied  science,  are 
thrown  into  a  common  stock,  from  which  the  tech- 
nical worker  draws  what  he  wants  without  stint. 
He,  in  his  turn,  is  coming  to  acknowledge  and 
recognize  the  truth  that  it  will  be  to  his  advan- 
tage to  enlarge  the  sphere  of  unreserved  inter- 
communication until  there  shall  be  no  trade- 
secrets;  for  then,  while  society  will  be  the  gainer, 
he  himself  will  be  able  to  draw  from  a  larger  capi- 
tal of  facts  than  now  stands  to  his  credit.  More- 
over, it  may  accepted  almost  as  a  law  of  nature 
that  the  preson  who  has  not  cultivated  the  habit 
of  mental  giving  acquires  a  spirit  of  narrow  ex- 
clusiveness  which  cramps  the  faculty  of  open- 
minded  receptivity — for  receiving  and  giving  are 
reciprocal  intellectual  motions. 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century  13 


Though  the  influence  of  individuals  on  the  in- 
dustry of  the  country  is  keenly  felt,  national 
progress,  in  its  widest  range,  is  not  made  through 
the  impelling  force  of  one  man,  be  he  ever  so  able. 
It  results  from  the  united  efforts  of  many  minds  . 
and  many  hands,  acting  under  the  contagion  of 
a  common  inspiration.  Looking  at  the  develop- 
ment of  a  whole  people,  or  of  a  single  industry 
as  a  unit,  we  may  therefore  perceive  that  the 
old  habits  of  secrecy  in  manufacturing  enter- 
prises frustrate  the  very  object  which  the  secret- 
keeper  aims  at;  for  while  he  is  guarding  behind 
double  doors  his  depreciated  treasure,  the  great 
army  of  progress  is  marching  past  him. 

To  a  certain  extent,  community  of  ideas  and 
methods  is  secured  through  such  combinations 
of  capital  and  manufacturing  interests  as  have 
become  the  most  prominent  features  of  modern 
industrial  development.  All  the  peculiar  pro- 
cesses and  methods  (if  there  be  such)  practiced 
by  each  of  a  dozen  combined  mills  become  the 
property  of  the  unified  concern,  and  can  be  ap- 
plied in  all  its  establishments.  But  should  the 
result  of  industrial  combinations  be  the  reversal 
of  the  tendency  towards  freer  discussions,  and 


14     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

should  the  managements  of  these  tremendous  ag- 
gregations of  power  prohibit  on  the  part  of  their 
employees  all  discussion  of  technical  subjects,  a 
strong  prejudice  against  their  existence  would 
.be  created  in  the  public  mind,  which  naturally 
distrusts  all  secretiveness.  The  public  will  not 
unreasonably  conclude  that  if  one  of  the  great 
economical  benefits  which  accrue  from  such  com- 
binations is  the  "pooling"  of  individual  secrets, 
much  greater  would  be  the  general  benefit  if  all 
reserve  should  disappear,  and  the  technical  facts 
learned  by  each  industrial  combination  were 
communicated  to  all,  as  freely  as  Rontgen  gave 
to  the  world  his  discovery  of  the  "X"  rays. 
Ours  is  stigmatized  as  a  mercenary  age.  Never- 
theless, there  is  a  spirit  of  fraternal  helpfulness 
abroad  in  the  world.  I  believe  that  before  long  he 
will  be  honored  as  the  most  successful  man  who  has 
communicated  to  his  fellow-craftsmen  the  greatest 
number  of  useful  facts  and  the  largest  stock  of 
valuable  personal  experience;  and  I  believe,  also, 
that  any  combination  of  selfish  men  or  interests 
which  may  try  to  withstand  this  rising  tide  of 
free  thought  and  free  speech  will  be  swept  away. 
As  I  have  already  remarked,  this  modern  spirit 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century  15 

of  voluntary  interchange  of  thought  and  expe- 
rience has  been  stimulated  by  the  means  of  trans- 
portation and  communication  which  alone  have 
made  its  effective  operation  possible.  Railroads, 
steamboats  and  the  telegraph  have  been  the 
apostles  and  missionaries  of  free  thought  and 
free  speech.  But  they  have  served  another  pur- 
pose. They  have  virtually  determined  the  cur- 
rent of  population  and  the  drift  of  mining  and 
metallurgical  industry. 

It  is  difficult  to  realize  the  diminutive  propor- 
tion of  human  settlement  on  this  continent  dur- 
ing the  first  three  decades  of  this  century.  In 
the  year  1800  the  population  of  the  United  States 
was  5,305,937.  There  were  only  903  post-offices 
and  21,000  miles  of  post-roads — and  very  bad 
roads  at  that.  The  Post  Office  revenue  amounted 
to  only  $231,000;  and  only  four  cities  could  boast 
of  a  population  exceeding  10,000  inhabitants. 

In  1830  the  population  had  increased,  chiefly 
by  natural  increment,  to  12,860,020.  But  the 
manufacture  of  metals  was  still  a  local  industry; 
and  so  it  continued  for  nearly  two  more  decades — 
while  the  railroad  system  of  the  country  was 
expanding,  so  as  to  link  section  with  section  and 


1 6     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

fuel  with  ore.  The  year  1830  was  economically 
the  critical  period  of  our  history,  for  in  it  the  rail- 
road first  appears  as  a  factor  in  our  industrial 
life.  Twenty-three  miles  of  track  had  been  laid. 
By  1840  locomotives  were  running  over  4535 
miles  of  road,  and  in  that  year  the  first  attempt 
was  made  to  incorporate  industrial  statistics  by 
quantity,  instead  of  value,  in  our  census-returns. 

If  we  compare  two  items  of  the  statistics  of 
1840  with  the  same  in  1899  we  shall  appreciate 
how  potent  the  railroad  has  been  as  a  controlling 
power  in  mining  and  smelting,  and  what  a  revo- 
lution it  has  wrought  in  the  industrial  life  of  the 
nation. 

As  we  have  said,  in  1840  there  were  4535  miles 
of  railroad  in  operation.  In  1840  there  were 
scattered  over  the  inhabited  sections  of  the  coun- 
try 804  small  blast-furnaces,  making  256,100 
tons  of  pig  iron.  In  1899  our  railroad  system 
included  250,142  miles  of  track,  and  there  were 
made  in  200  blast-furnaces  13,620,703  tons  of 
pig  iron.  If  we  multiply  by  53  the  number  of 
miles  of  railroad  in  operation  in  1840  and  the 
number  of  tons  of  pig  iron  made  in  that  same  year 
by  the  same  multiplier,  we  get  approximately 


Technical  Progress  of  the  19th  Century  17 

the  mileage  of  track  now  in  existence  and  the 
tonnage  of  pig  iron  turned  out  by  our  blast- 
furnaces, viz.,  249,425  miles  of  track,  instead  of 
250,142,  and  14,085,500  tons  of  pig  iron  instead 
of  13,620,703.  The  relation  cannot  be  accidental, 
for  there  is  every  reason  why  the  magnificent 
iron  industry  of  the  country  should  keep  pace 
with  the  extension  of  its  railroad  system.  The 
lines  of  growth  have  not  always  been  perfectly 
harmonious,  but  there  has  never  been  any  wide 
divergence  from  parallelism. 

[Though  the  production  of  pig  iron  since  1898 
has  increased  more  rapidly  than  the  mileage  of 
the  steam  railroads,  if  the  mileage  of  the  extra- 
urban  electric  and  steam  street  roads,  and  the 
increase  in  second  tracks,  be  added  to  that  of 
the  railroads,  the  ratio  is  closely  maintained. 
Recently  the  miscalled  street  railroads, — as  ur- 
ban, suburban  and  interurban  roads — have  been 
extended  in  competition  with  the  railroads  from 
town  to  town,  and  in  some  cases  are  constructed 
on  the  standard  of  a  railroad,  with  heavy  steel 
and  rolling  stock  for  freight.  The  Union  Trac- 
tion Co.  controls  not  less  than  1201  miles  of  road, 
centering  in  Philadelphia;  the  United  Power  & 


i8     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

Transportation  Co.  controls  some  220  miles;  and 
the  United  Traction  Co.  of  Reading  650  miles. 
In  California,  the  system  centering  in  Los  Angeles 
has  in  operation  or  under  construction  826  miles 
of  track.  In  1904,  the  mileage  in  operation  or 
under  construction  of  these  street  railroads  in 
the  United  States,  has  reached  a  total  of  about 
28,000  miles.  The  Census  Bulletin  Number  3 
reports  for  1902,  22,589  miles  as  in  operation. 
In  1903  the  number  of  miles  of  railroad  track 
was  283,821.  If  to  this  be  added  28,000  miles 
of  street  railway  track,  we  have  a  total  mileage 
of  311,821.  The  pig  iron  production  for  1903 
was  17,942,840.  If,  therefore,  the  pig  iron  pro- 
duction of  1840  be  multiplied  by  70,  we  have 
17,927,000  tons,  as  against  the  actual  produc- 
tion for  that  year  of  17,942,840.  And  if  the  rail- 
road mileage  of  4835  in  1840  be  multiplied  by 
the  same  multiplier,  we  have  317,450  miles  of 
track,  as  against  the  actual  of  311,821  miles  of 
track.] 

Equally  important  in  its  bearing  on  the  iron- 
trade  has  been  the  development  of  inland  navi- 
gation. The  difference  between  the  first  steamer, 
"Walk  on  the  Water,"  that  timidly  ventured 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century  19 


out  on  Lake  Erie,  and  the  present  large  iron 
steamers,  which,  with  their  consorts,  last  year 
transported  14,000,000  tons  of  iron-ore  from 
Lake  Superior  ports,  is  as  great  as  between  the 
"John  Bull"  of  the  Mohawk  &  Hudson  R.  R. 
and  No.  999  of  the  N.  Y.  Central  &  Hudson 
River  R.  R.  [The  tonnage  of  the  steamers  on 
our  Lakes,  especially  those  devoted  to  the  trans- 
portation of  iron-ores,  is  growing  as  rapidly  as 
the  size  of  our  railroad  trains. 

The  "Augustus  B.  Wolvin"  and  the  "Sahara," 
the  two  largest  boats  on  the  Lakes,  were  both 
launched  in  1904.  Their  dimensions  are : 


Length, 

Beam, 

Depth, 

Feet. 

Feet. 

Feet. 

"Wolvin"  

540 

56 

32 

10,000  gross  tons  on 

draught  of  18  J  feet 

"Sahara"  

474 

52 

29 

8,000  to  9,000  gross 

tons 

Of  vessels  plying  the  Great  Lakes  there  are  67 
having  a  tonnage  capacity  exceeding  4500  gross 
tons.  Nineteen  of  these  have  a  tonnage  capacity 
exceeding  5000  gross  tons.] 

With  increased  size  of,  and  improved  machin- 
ery in,  vehicles  on  land  and  water,  the  cost  of 


20     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

transportation  has  correspondingly  decreased, 
until  freight  has  been  carried,  on  long-distance 
hauls,  with  profit  to  the  railroad  company,  for 
four  mills  per  ton-mile.  [Railroad  freights  on 
certain  commodities  are  as  low  as  even  two  and 
a  half  to  three  mills  per  ton-mile  for  long  hauls.] 
The  data  for  comparison  with  former  freights 
are  scanty,  but  the  statistics  of  the  Fitchburg 
R.  R.  give  us  as  the  average  freight  rate  in  1848 
4.523  cents,  and  in  1897  0.870  cent  per  ton- 
mile. 

When  Lake  Superior  began  to  ship  iron-ore,  in 
1857,  the  transportation-charges  were  about  $3 
per  ton  to  Lake  Erie  ports.  The  "wild"  and 
"daily"  rate  in  1897  was  55  cents;  the  contract- 
rate,  65  cents.  From  Escanaba  it  was  only  45 
cents,  and  from  Duluth  57  cents.  Freight  has 
been  transported  across  the  Atlantic,  a  distance 
of  3000  miles,  for  a  little  over  $1  per  ton.  This 
obliteration  of  distances  by  steam-power  has 
altered  completely  the  commercial  and  even  the 
social  conditions  of  the  country.  Before  the  rail- 
road and  steamboat  produced  the  industrial  uni- 
fication of  the  continent,  not  only  were  food  and 
clothes  the  product  of  local  and  domestic  manu- 


Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century  21 

facture,  but  such  a  necessary  article  as  iron  was 
cast  in  small  furnaces  or  reduced  in  small  bloom- 
eries,  wherever  iron-ore  and  charcoal  were  found, 
even  in  limited  quantities,  near  a  water-power, 
To  transport  either  fuel  or  ore  for  any  distance 
over  bad  country-roads  to  large  establishments 
was  less  economical  than  to  run  the  village  fur- 
nace or  forge.  With  the  appearance  of  the  rail- 
road commenced  the  concentration  of  raw  mate- 
rial and  the  shifting  of  the  centers  of  the  iron- 
industry  to  a  few  favored  localities.  The  process 
has  continued  ever  since,  to  the  serious  detriment 
and  even  destruction  of  some  of  the  older  mining 
and  metallurgical  districts,  and  the  creation  of 
prosperous  communities  in  what  was,  a  genera- 
tion or  two  ago,  an  inaccessible  wilderness.  Ore 
and  fuel  need  no  longer  occur  in  natural  juxta- 
position: ore  from  the  Mesaba  range  in  Minne- 
sota, has  been  delivered  at  so  low  a  figure  at 
Pittsburgh,  in  Pennsylvania,  that,  when  turned 
into  iron  and  steel  by  the  aid  of  mechanical  appli- 
ances, steel  rails  have  been  made  from  it,  and 
sold  at  $16  per  ton.  It  is  less  than  a  generation 
since  Bessemer  rails,  made  by  the  same  process, 
but  out  of  costlier  ores  and  by  cruder  appliances, 


22     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

cost  $120  per  ton.  In  very  truth,  so  obedient 
have  the  forces  of  nature  become  to  the  will  of 
man  that  weight  and  distance,  which  were,  in  the 
days  of  hard  labor  and  horse-carts,  controlling 
considerations,  are  being  well-nigh  eliminated 
from  the  calculations  of  modem  engineers. 

Cheap  transportation  has  not  affected  the  iron 
industry  alone.  It  has  made  it  possible  to  utilize 
the  copper-  and  lead-ores  of  the  West,  and  to 
reduce  the  cost  of  their  treatment,  by  taking 
advantage  of  neighboring  natural  facilities.  For 
instance,  the  Anaconda  Co.  transports  its  ore 
for  a  few  cents  from  Butte  to  water  at  Anaconda, 
38  miles  distant;  and  it  is  advantageous  to  carry 
Boston  &  Montana  ore  over  176  miles  to  water- 
power  on  the  Missouri  River.  But  the  very 
romance  of  transportation  was  reached  in  the 
following  instance:  matte  was  bought  at  full 
price  in  Tennessee;  transported  by  rail  to  Nor- 
folk, Va.;  then  shipped  to  Tampico,  in  Mexico; 
carried  half-way  across  that  Republic;  saturated 
with  gold  and  silver;  concentrated  into  black 
copper,  and  brought  back  by  rail  and  water  to 
New  Jersey  for  electrolytic  treatment!  Every- 
where the  same  wonderful  interchange  of  products 


Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century  23 

and  transfer  of  energy  from  one  part  of  a  land  to 
another,  or  from  one  country  to  another,  are  being 
effected  by  the  same  agencies,  thus  making  the 
whole  world  kin,  and  more  or  less  interdependent 
as  well  as  independent.  With  further  improve- 
ment in  motive-power  by  land  and  sea,  the  pres- 
ent cost  of  transportation,  low  as  it  is,  will  be 
steadily  reduced,  until  the  day  will  come  when  the 
natural  resources  of  every  land  will  be  the  com- 
mon property  of  the  whole  world.  Already  the 
great  German  iron  and  steel  plants  of  Stettin 
rely  entirely  on  imported  crude  material.  Eng- 
land, Germany,  and  France  draw  most  of  their 
supply  of  iron-ore  from  foreign  lands.  Even  we 
ourselves  do  not  depend  altogether  on  home 
supply.  And  when  we  review  the  world's  re- 
sources, we  must  be  convinced  that  the  quantity 
available  within  economical  reach  is  so  enormous 
as  to  preclude  all  risk  of  failure  from  the  ex- 
haustion of  raw  material  or  of  the  acquisition 
by  any  one  country  of  a  monopoly  of  manufac- 
ture. In  the  north  of  Sweden,  within  the  Arctic 
circle,  are  iron  ore  deposits  of  phenomenal  size. 

Since  1899  these  enormous  deposits  of  iron-ore 
have  been  rendered  accessible  by  a  railroad  ter- 


24     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

minating  at  Narvik  or  Victoriahavn  on  the  Atlan- 
tic, a  port  free  from  ice  the  year  around.  The 
railroad  was  opened  on  November  15,  1902, 
but  the  docks  of  Narvik  are  not  yet  completed. 
The  Gellivara  mines  have  been  shipping  over 
1,000,000  tons  of  ore  a  year  over  a  railroad  which 
has  been  open  for  several  years  to  Lulea  on  the 
Gulf  of  Bothnia,  a  port  which  is  closed  by  ice 
during  the  winter.  But  the  Gellivara  is  one  of 
the  smaller  deposits.  The  Kiirunavaara  deposit 
has  a  continuous  length  of  over  two  miles  and 
an  average  width  of  about  300  feet,  and  its  ex- 
tension, the  Luossavaara  deposit,  which  has  not 
yet  been  touched,  is  estimated  to  contain  above 
the  level  of  Lake  Luossagaivi  218,000,000  tons 
of  ore.  That  the  ore  contains  on  an  average  far 
too  much  phosphorus  for  treatment  on  an  acid 
bottom  is  considered  no  disadvantage  by  the 
German  works  at  Lulea,  where  some  of  the  phos- 
phorus is  separated  mechanically  as  apatite,  as 
is  now  done  on  Lake  Champlain,  for  treatment 
by  the  German  steel  works,  who  have  no  preju- 
dice against  the  basic  bottom.  The  Kiirunavaara- 
Luossavaara  deposit  is  only  105  miles  by  railroad 
from  the  port  of  Narvik.  The  Gellivara  deposit 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century  25 

is  168  miles,  and  the  Roulevara  deposits,  which 
are  almost  as  extensive  as  the  Kiirunavaara- 
Luossavara  deposits,  lie  only  70  miles  west  of 
Gellivara.  There  are  therefore  within  an  area 
not  larger  than  that  comprised  within  the  Mesaba 
and  Vermilion  Ranges  deposits  of  iron-ore  re- 
markably high  in  iron,  though  high  also  in  phos- 
phorus, whose  horizontal  section  is  approximately 
1,000,000  square  meters,  and  containing  above 
the  surface  not  less  than  500,000,000  tons  of  ore. 
Their  accessibility  to  the  markets  of  Northern 
Europe  compares  favorably  with  that  of  our  own 
Lake  Superior  ores  to  our  own  iron  centers.  The 
average  distance  which  the  Kiirunavaara-Luos- 
savara  ores  must  be  carried  to  reach  Narvik  is 
very  few  miles  greater  than  that  over  which  the 
ores  of  the  Mesaba  and  Vermilion  Ranges  are 
transported  over  the  D.  &  I.  R.R.  or  the  D.  M. 
&  N.  Ry.  to  the  docks  on  Lake  Superior.  Once 
on  board  ship  the  Swedish  ores  travel  1170  miles 
to  reach  Middlesborough  as  against  834  miles 
which  is  the  distance  of  Duluth  from  Cleveland, 
or  985  from  the  same  point  to  Buffalo.  If  con- 
signed to  Pittsburgh  furnaces,  the  Lake  Superior 
ore  has  to  be  trans-shipped  at  an  Erie  port  and 


26     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

carried  by  rail  150  miles  further.  The  climatic 
conditions  for  transportation  and  the  geographical 
relation  of  the  Swedish  ores  to  the  furnaces  of 
Northern  Europe  are  as  favorable  as  that  of  the 
Lake  Superior  ores  to  our  furnaces  on  the  Lakes, 
and  more  favorable  than  their  relation  to  Pitts- 
burgh.* 

According  to  the  Engineering  and  Mining  Jour- 
nal, it  is  reported  that  four  of  the  largest  iron  pro- 
ducers in  Germany,  including  the  Gutehoffenung, 
Deutscher  Kaiser,  Rheinische  and  Krupp  com- 
panies, have  entered  into  a  contract  with  the 
Trafaktiebolaget  Grangesberg  Ocselosun,  the 
owners,  for  the  delivery  of  14,000,000  tons  of 
iron-ore.  The  shipments  are  to  be  made  via 
Emden  and  Holland  ports.  The  ore  will  be 
mined  from  the  deposits  of  Grangesberg,  Gelli- 
vara  and  Kiirunavaara. 

On  the  shores  of  Hudson  Bay,  of  Baffin  Bay, 
and  of  Newfoundland  large  deposits  of  iron-ore 
occur,  which  are  not  excluded  by  ice  for  a  much 

*  Lundbohm,  Iron-Ore  Fields  of  the  Province  of  Norrbolten, 
Stockholm,  1898,  and  W.  F.  Wilkinson  on  "  Iron-Ore  Mining  in 
Scandinavia"  Transactions  of  the  Institution  of  Mining  and 
Metallurgy. 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century  27 

longer  period  of  the  year  from  the  market  of  the 
world  than  are  ours  by  like  obstacles  from  our 
own  markets;  [and  very  extensive  deposits  of 
high  grade  ore  exist  almost  on  the  Pacific  coast 
of  Mexico.  This  seems  a  locality  far  from  the 
commercial  centers  of  the  world,  but  when  the 
Panama  Canal  is  opened,  it  will  be  within  the 
circle  of  accessible  commerce].  When  our  canals 
shall  have  been  enlarged,  or  new  ones  shall  have 
been  built,  Lake  Superior  ores  may  find  their 
way  to  European  furnaces  almost  as  cheaply  as 
to  Pittsburgh.  [While  no  Lake  Superior  ore  has 
as  yet  been  shipped  in  quantity  to  Europe,  Lake 
Champlain  mines  have  consigned  large  shipments 
to  Scotland  and  Holland.  The  Engineering  and 
Mining  Journal  is  responsible  for  the  statement 
that  in  June  of  1904,  12,000  tons  were  sent,  to  be 
followed  by  18,000  tons  more  to  cover  contracts 
of  30,000  tons.  This  ore  is  shipped  by  Wither- 
bee,  Sherman  &  Co.,  and  is  from  the  mines  owned 
by  that  company,  in  the  Lake  Champlain  dis- 
trict in  New  York.  The  ore  is  carried  from  Port 
Henry  by  Lake  and  Canal  to  New  York  harbor. 
The  movement  has  been  favored  by  low  ocean 
rates,  the  charge  from  New  York  to  Antwerp 


28     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

being  about  five  shillings,  or  $1.20  per  ton.]  Cali- 
fornia has  drawn  coal  from  New  South  Wales  and 
sulphur  from  Japan.  England  depends  largely 
on  New  Zealand  for  her  fresh  mutton;  and  our 
wheat,  beef  and  pork  feed  the  population  of  the 
world.  Thus  nature's  commodities,  now  that 
we  are  learning  how  to  control  and  use  nature's 
forces,  are  becoming  the  common  property  of  all 
mankind.  If  that  be  so,  and  if  the  world's  re- 
sources are  in  the  future  to  become  more  and 
more  cosmopolitan,  the  race  for  industrial  pre- 
eminence will  not  necessarily  be  to  those  who 
possess  within  their  own  national  domain  the 
crude  materials  for  workmanship,  but  to  those 
who  by  native  wit  and  scientific  learning  and 
acute  research  can,  out  of  the  crude  material, 
manufacture,  most  cheaply  and  of  best  quality, 
just  what  the  world  at  large  wants.  And  there- 
fore, if  certain  groups  of  the  world's  inhabitants 
progress  more  rapidly  than  others,  it  will  not  be 
altogether  or  primarily  because  they  possess  an 
undue  share  of  nature's  material  gifts,  but  be- 
cause they  evince  more  aptitude  in  availing  them- 
selves of  the  opportunities  which  nature  offers 
them. 


Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century  29 

Our  own  industrial  growth  has  excited  the 
wonder  of  the  world.  While  it  is  true  that  our 
progress  would  not  have  been  so  rapid  and  so  far- 
reaching  in  its  influence,  had  the  nation  not  pos- 
sessed within  its  own  boundaries  natural  resources 
as  extraordinary  for  their  diversity  as  for  their 
quantity,  certain  political  and  social  forces  have 
concurred  in  facilitating  our  growth.  Only  two 
generations  have  passed  since  the  era  of  our  rapid 
industrial  advance  began.  Since  then  we  have 
been  able  to  tap  the  untouched  resources  of  a 
whole,  marvellously  rich  continent,  with  the 
whole  world's  past  experience  to  draw  from, 
while  relieved  from  many  of  the  social  and  indus- 
trial complications  which  impede  free  action  in 
the  Old  World.  Never  in  the  history  of  mankind 
have  so  many  favorable  causes  combined  to  assist 
the  industrial  development  of  a  people.  During 
the  first  half  of  the  century,  few  sordid  distrac- 
tions withdrew  the  nation's  energies  from  the 
greatest  task  a  people  can  undertake — the  crea- 
tion and  consolidation  of  a  system  of  popular 
government.  With  the  establishment  of  this  on  a 
firm  basis,  the  discoveries  of  modern  science  and 
technology  coincided.  Thus  a  free  nation  was 


30     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

enabled  to  turn  to  account  its  splendid  resources 
with  the  aid  of  appliances  and  natural  forces 
which  were  contemporaneously  and  for  the  first 
time  being  brought  under  the  control  of  man- 
kind. Yet,  for  all  that,  had  there  not  been  cer- 
tain qualities  in  the  national  character,  or,  per- 
haps, to  speak  more  accurately,  in  the  spirit  of 
our  industrial  classes,  these  bounties  of  nature 
would  have  remained  hidden  or  neglected. 

When  we  try  to  analyze  the  social  influences 
which  have  been,  apart  from  the  natural  advan- 
tages of  this  country,  the  impelling  causes  in 
bringing  about  its  rapid  rise  in  the  industrial 
scale,  certain  differences  which  distinguish  the 
conditions  existing  here  from  those  of  the  older 
industrial  centers  of  Europe  are  very  conspicuous. 
Labor,  generally  superabundant  abroad,  has  here 
been  scarce,  and  therefore  dear.  To  this  cause 
is,  in  part,  though  not  altogether,  attributable 
our  substitution  of  machinery  for  hand-labor  in 
every  department  of  life.  To  consider  the  ulti- 
mate effect  of  this  substitution  on  our  national 
life  is  beyond  our  province,  but  is  is  almost  cer- 
tain that  this  elimination  of  manual  labor  is  ex- 
erting both  an  elevating  and  a  depraving  influ- 


Technical  Progress  of  the  19th  Century  31 

ence  on  our  working  classes.  The  handling  of 
machinery  requires,  in  some  vocations,  a  keener 
intelligence  than  the  manual  use  of  tools.  The 
engineer  of  a  steam-hoist  brings  into  play  a  set  of 
faculties  very  different  from  those  exercised  by 
the  men  toiling  at  the  handles  of  a  windlass.  The 
gunner  of  a  modern  man-of-war  must  be  some- 
what of  a  mathematician  as  well  as  a  sailor.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  effect  of  repeating,  day  in 
and  day  out,  the  same  series  of  manual  opera- 
tions, in  keeping  up  with  the  unvarying  speed 
of  a  machine,  tends  to  reduce  the  man  to  the 
level  of  the  machine  itself,  and  must  have  a  most 
benumbing  effect  on  the  faculties.  The  all- 
round  mechanic  of  former  days  is  rapidly  be- 
coming extinct. 

A  factor  in  our  progress  which  should  not  be 
overlooked  is  that  our  miners  and  metallurgists 
have  the  advantage  of  working  new  mines  and 
starting  and  operating  new  smelting  works,  in- 
stead of  being  the  successors  of  generations  of 
eminent  men,  whose  fame  was  in  all  the  schools, 
and  to  question  whose  methods,  and  even  their 
theories,  were  heresy.  The  conditions  facing  the 
trained  miner  and  metallurgist  even  in  the  East, 


32     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

but  especially  in  the  West,  are  so  different  to 
those  for  which  rules  and  precepts  were  laid 
down  by  his  teachers,  that  he  had  of  necessity 
to  depart  from  precedent,  and  shape  out  for  him- 
self new  machinery  and  adopt  for  his  practice 
new  processes,  while  living  up  to  the  scientific 
principles  which  must  underlie  all  successful 
work.  It  is  easier,  however,  for  him  to  do  so 
than  it  is  for  the  manager  of  Old  World  estab- 
lishments to  adapt  himself  to  altered  conditions, 
and  more  modern  methods.  Even  if  his  rever- 
ence for  the  past  be  as  profound,  and  his  knowl- 
edge of  its  ways  as  deep,  as  those  of  his  European 
confreres,  it  wounds  him  less  to  tear  himself  away 
from  the  old  ways  which  have  become  almost 
sacred  through  long  practice  than  it  would  be  for 
the  manager  of  works  in  Saxony  or  the  Hartz,  or 
Swansea,  to  desecrate  the  memory  of  his  ancestors. 
Again,  while  it  is  true  that  without  the  scien- 
tific assistance  which  highly  trained  metallur- 
gists have  contributed  to  our  American  miners 
and  metallurgists  who  compose  so  large  a  pro- 
portion of  our  operating  staff,  our  eminent  posi- 
tion would  not  have  been  attained,  unless  the 
initiative  had  generally  been  taken  by  men  who 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century  33 

brought  native  wit  rather  than  training  to  bear 
on  the  solution  of  the  many  new  problems  that 
have  presented  themselves. 

And  this  spirit  of  originality,  not  of  revolt 
against  the  past,  influences  the  business  depart- 
ment of  our  important  enterprises  as  keenly  as 
it  does  the  operating.  It  is  seen  in  nothing  more 
conspicuously  than  in  the  worthlessness  attached 
to  an  old  plant;  the  recognition  of  the  fact  that 
it  is  intrinsically  valueless  except  for  the  work 
it  is  actually  doing,  and  that  as  soon  as  it  falls 
behind  the  plant  of  a  competitor  in  efficiency  it 
must  be  torn  down  and  replaced  by  another,  which 
will  enable  its  owner  to  maintain  his  position. 
Of  course,  this  expensive  practice  is  economical 
only  when  applied  to  works  where  the  saving 
on  the  unit  of  production  is  so  large  as  to  warrant 
it,  and  where,  as  invariably  happens,  the  new 
plant  introduces  new  mechanical  appliances, 
which  reduces  the  labor  cost.  Nevertheless,  the 
willingness  with  which  capital  thus  wipes  out 
what  stands  at  such  a  high  figure  on  its  books, 
the  certainty  with  which  it  anticipates  that  busi- 
ness will  grow  and  not  decline,  and  the  cheerful- 
ness with  which  it  faces  depression  and  even  dis- 


34     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

aster,  when  buoyed  up  with  this  confidence,  are 
traits  which  have  distinguished  American  mining 
and  metallurgical  companies,  in  all  departments, 
from  their  foreign  competitors. 

In  many  other  respects  our  rivals  in  trade  are 
handicapped,  and  it  is  fair  that  we  should  take 
credit  only  for  what  we  really  deserve.  In  this 
country,  few  local  ties  bind  the  employer  and 
the  employed.  In  the  Old  World  the  case  is 
different.  There  certain  branches  of  manufac- 
ture have  been  planted  for  generations  in  the 
same  locality.  The  business  has  been  conducted 
by  the  ancestors  of  the  present  owners,  and  the 
work  has  been  done  by  the  ancestors  of  the  present 
operatives;  and  there  has  grown  up  a  certain 
sense  of  joint  interest,  if  not  common  ownership, 
in  the  works.  This  makes  difficult  the  intro- 
duction of  modern  methods  and  of  modern  ma- 
chinery, which,  to  say  the  least,  necessarily  in- 
volves a  dislocation  of  old  associations.  In 
the  famous  Krupp  works  at  Essen,  for  instance, 
the  house,  not  bigger  than  a  hut,  in  which  the 
founder  of  the  famous  firm  lived,  is  preserved  as 
the  nucleus  of  the  existing  wonderful  mill,  as 
sacredly  as  though  it  were  the  sanctuary  of  a 


Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century  35 

temple.  In  going  through  the  plant,  I  observed 
that  the  Bessemer  converters  were  idle.  All  the 
steel  was  being  made  in  the  open-hearth  furnaces. 
I  asked  my  guide  what  had  become  of  the  Besse- 
mer workmen.  He  said  they  were  being  em- 
ployed on  buildings  for  a  new  colony.  I,  not 
unnaturally,  observed  that  steel-workers  must 
prove  unhandy  operatives  at  any  other  craft; 
but  my  guide  replied  that  Mr.  Krupp  never  dis- 
charged a  faithful  man  if  it  were  possible  to  find 
temporary  employment  for  him  in  some  other 
department.  Such  a  sentimental  motive  seldom 
influences  our  great  employers  of  labor;  and 
our  independent  workmen  would  despise  as  un- 
business-like  such  a  procedure. 

[Shortly  after  my  visit  to  Mr.  Krupp's  works 
I  met  an  American  manufacturer  who  told  me 
that  by  introducing  electricity  as  a  motive  power 
from  a  central  station  he  had  been  able  to  dis- 
charge five  hundred  workmen.  I  asked  him  what 
had  become  of  the  five  hundred.  His  reply  was 
that  there  is  plenty  of  vacant  land  in  America 
as  well  as  vacant  employment  for  them.  Their 
future  gave  him  no  concern,  nor  perhaps  need 
it  have  done  so.] 


36     Characteristics  and  Conditions  of  the 

Looking  at  this  phase  of  our  industrial  system 
from  an  economical  point  of  view,  the  absence 
of  such  sympathy,  and  the  latitude  it  allows  to 
our  manufacturer  to  do  what  self-interest  sug- 
gests, materially  aid  in  introducing  economies 
which  (at  any  rate,  temporarily)  give  him  an  ad- 
vantage over  his  European  competitors.  Abroad 
this  bond  is  so  strong  between  the  owners  of  old 
works  and  the  descendants  of  the  ancestral  work- 
men, that  I  know  of  one  large  establishment  in 
Britain  which  is  anxious  to  introduce  modern 
appliances,  involving  a  change  in  methods  so 
radical  as  to  require  the  discharge  of  a  very  large 
number  of  its  old  hands;  but  the  odium  and 
opposition  incurred  by  doing  this  in  the  home  of 
the  old  industry  would  be  so  intolerable  that, 
rather  than  face  them,  despite  the  economical 
absurdity  of  the  alternative  recourse,  the  old 
works  will  probably  be  completely  abandoned 
and  new  ones  will  be  erected  in  a  distant  portion 
of  the  kingdom. 

It  is  difficult  for  us  to  appreciate  the  gravity 
of  such  obstacles  to  change  and  progress;  and 
yet,  at  the  same  time,  one  regrets  that  before 
the  inexorable  claims,  of  modern  mechanical 


Technical  Progress  of  the  iQth  Century  37 

progress,  the  fine  family  feeling  of  co-partnership, 
in  which  such  obstacles  originate,  should  be 
crushed.  And,  looking  beyond  the  present,  we 
must  perceive  that  on  the  solution  of  these  difficult 
and  obstinate  problems  the  advance  of  some  over 
others  of  the  great  industrial  communities  of  the 
world  in  the  twentieth  century  will  depend. 

We  shall,  however,  commit  a  grievous  mis- 
take, if  we  imagine  that  the  reaction  of  our  ex- 
ample upon  Europe  will  not  be  as  sensitively  felt 
as  the  influence  of  Europe  has  been  felt  by  us  in 
the  past.  England  is  more  seriously  handicapped 
than  any  of  the  progressive  peoples  in  reorganiz- 
ing her  industrial  household,  by  the  fact  that  for 
half  of  the  last  century  she  was  the  paramount 
power  in  the  industrial  world,  and  that  it  is  diffi- 
cult for  any  country  thus  situated  to  reach  the 
conclusion  that  some,  even,  of  the  machinery  and 
methods  of  trade  and  manufacture,  which  gave 
her  supremacy,  may  have  become  obsolete,  and 
should  be  discarded.  But  she  is  rapidly  recog- 
nizing the  truth  that  conditions  have  changed, 
and  that  she  must  change  with  them.  Germany, 
on  the  other  hand,  and  to  a  lesser  extent  Belgium 
and  France,  started  on  the  new  development  of 


38  Technical  Progress  of  the  igth  Century 

their  mineral  resources  at  a  later  date  than  our- 
selves, and  are  less  weighted  down  than  is  Eng- 
land by  old  plants  and  old  prejudices. 

As  all  these  vigorous  competitors  are  in  the 
field,  and  will  be  bidders  against  us  in  the  markets 
of  the  world,  which  we  are  about  to  enter,  and 
rivals  even  in  our  own  markets,  we  will  make  a 
grave  error  if  we  count  on  victory  mainly  through 
the  resources  of  the  coal  and  the  iron-ores,  which 
we  possess  within  our  own  land;  for  the  conclu- 
sion and  lesson  I  would  rightly  or  wrongly  draw 
from  the  preceding  general  survey  is,  that  the 
industrial  standard  of  a  nation  in  the  twentieth 
century  is  likely  to  be  determined  more  by  its 
capacity  for  progress  than  by  its  mere  possession 
of  crude  natural  resources.  Not  only  the  world's 
primary  supplies,  but  also  the  world's  technical 
experience,  are  becoming  more  and  more  the 
heritage  of  all;  and  consequently  the  lead  will 
be  taken  by  the  nation  whose  technical  managers 
possess  skill,  stimulated  and  not  stunted  by  edu- 
cation, and  so  directed  as,  by  elevating  the  intel- 
lectual condition  of  its  operatives,  to  prevent 
them  from  sinking  to  the  level  of  mere  cogs  in  the 
wheel  of  a  soulless  industrial  machine. 


The  Development  of  American    Mining  and 

Metallurgy,  and  the  Equipments  of  a 

Training  School 


An  Address  Delivered  before  the  School  of  Mines  and  Metallurgy,  of 
the  University  of  Missouri,  May  30th,  1901. 


GENTLEMEN  : 

I  have  been  asked  to  address  you  to-day  on  the 
twin  subjects  of  the  Development  of  American 
Mining  and  Metallurgy  and  the  Requirements  of 
a  Mining  School,  for  which  please  understand 
the  requirements  of  a  student  after  he  has  left  a 
Mining  School.  The  subjects  are  so  closely  re- 
lated that  the  elucidation  of  the  one  will  serve 
as  a  text  to  the  other.  I  will  not  bore  you  with 
a  table  of  statistics,  which  are  forgotten  by  the 
hearer  as  rapidly  as  uttered  by  the  speaker. 
They  certainly  flatter  our  national  vanity,  but 
are  not,  in  so  far  as  they  consist  merely  of  unre- 
lated columns  of  figures,  especially  useful.  Some 
day  or  other  the  statistical  branch  of  political 

39 


4-O  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

economy  may  be  reduced  to  the  order  of  a  sci- 
ence. When  this  is  done  even  mineral  statistics 
may  assist  us  in  forecasting  the  future,  which  is 
one  of  the  provinces  of  science,  and  thus  in  a  cer- 
tain sense,  give  stability  to  our  industrial  system 
— if  system  it  may  be  called.  This  will  come 
about  when  we  trace  the  industrial  relations  of 
metals  to  one  another  and  to  the  vicissitudes  of 
economic  life.  Take  for  instance  the  fact  that 
the  production  of  pig  iron  in  this  country  and  the 
increase  in  mileage  of  our  railroads  have  almost 
exactly  kept  pace  during  the  last  sixty  years;  or 
the  further  fact  that  the  production  and  con- 
sumption of  iron  and  copper,  taking  the  world  as 
a  whole,  during  the  past  half  century  has  grown 
in  equal  proportions.  If  we  could  trace  a  num- 
ber of  such  relations,  we  would  have  partial  data 
on  which  to  predict  the  activity  of  a  given  branch 
of  metallurgy  when  the  country  was  enjoying 
prosperity,  or  the  depression  which  must  follow 
when  railroad  traffic  is  in  sympathy  with  na- 
tional distress.  Again,  if  we  could  formulate  the 
law,  assuming  that  there  be  such  a  law,  which 
expresses  the  reliance,  both  as  to  production  and 
demand,  of  the  rarer  useful  metals  on  iron,  and 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School    41 

their  price,  by  comparison  with  the  demand  for 
and  the  price  of  iron  and  steel,  we  would  convert 
the  study  of  mineral  statistics  from  being  the 
driest  and  most  tedious  accumulation  of  isolated 
and  often  irrelevant  figures  into  one  of  the  most 
useful  branches  of  economics.  Moreover,  when- 
ever you  discover  a  statistical  fact  or  a  statistical 
relation  which  tends  to  erect  statistics  into  a  sci- 
ence, you  help  to  bridge  that  heretofore  impass- 
able gulf  intervening  between  the  exact  sciences, 
which  are  independent  of  human  volition,  and 
therefore  of  human  interference,  such  as  mathe- 
matics and  astronomy,  and  that  still  more  im- 
portant group  of  sciences  in  which  man,  as  a 
sentient  and  willful  being,  seems  to  modify,  if 
he  does  not  control,  the  play  of  natural  forces. 
But,  as  I  said,  I  shall  not  worry  you  with  columns 
of  figures. 

That  we  should  be  the  largest  producers  of 
metals  in  the  world  is  not  to  be  wondered  at, 
considering  our  preponderating  size  and  advan- 
tageous geographic  position  among  its  industrial 
units,  and  taking  into  further  account  the  fact 
that  we  are  working  virgin  soil  of  an  almost  newly 
discovered  continent,  while  our  most  important 


42  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

competitors  were  metal  producers  from  ten  to 
twenty-five  centuries  ago.  The  surprising  feat- 
ure of  our  short  industrial  history  is  rather  the 
amazing  speed  with  which  we  have  reached  our 
dominant  position. 

And  what,  therefore,  it  is  of  utmost  importance 
to  us  to  study  are  the  causes,  including  traits  of 
national  character,  which  have  helped  us  towards 
taking  the  lead  as  metal  producers;  for,  if  we  are 
to  maintain  it,  you,  as  miners  and  metallurgists, 
must  be  inspired  by  the  same  spirit  and  follow 
the  same  general  methods  as  have  enabled  the 
passing  generation  to  raise  this  country  from  a 
position  of  dependence  to  that  of  a  leader,  not 
only  in  bulk  of  production,  but  in  ingenious  appli- 
cation of  scientific  principles  to  practical  utility. 

If  we  go  back  a  little  more  than  half  a  century 
to  1840,  when  the  first  industrial  census  was  made, 
we  find  that  there  were  scattered  throughout  the 
length  and  breadth  of  the  land,  from  Maine  to 
the  wilderness  of  Wisconsin,  804  iron  blast-fur- 
naces, making  256,100  tons  of  pig  iron,  or  one 
pig  per  diem  per  furnace,  and  796  bloomeries  and 
forges,  making  small  quantities  of  wrought  iron 
direct  from  the  ores,  or  converting  some  of  the 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School   43 

pig  into  malleable  iron.  These  little  furnaces 
and  bloomeries  and  forges  were  not  worked  by 
trained  metallurgists,  but  by  farmers  and  back- 
woodsmen, who  .had  to  produce  a  local  supply  of 
iron,  owing  to  the  distance  from  a  market  and 
the  difficulty  of  transportation,  and  who,  wherever 
there  was  wood  from  which  to  make  charcoal  and 
water  to  give  them  blast,  and  a  small  or  large 
deposit  of  rich  iron  ore,  employed  that  mechan- 
ical ingenuity,  self-reliance,  and  adaptiveness 
which  have  always  been  such  marked  character- 
istics of  the  American  character  to  supply  their 
wants.  They  were  not  in  any  sense  educated 
metallurgists,  but  they  possessed  that  same  spirit 
which  has  converted  into  shrewd  geologists,  of  a 
rough  and  ready  type,  and  into  skillful,  practical, 
if  not  theoretical,  metallurgists,  hosts  of  men  from 
every  walk  of  life  who  have  drifted  from  the  East 
across  the  Missouri  and  become,  as  prospectors, 
the  pioneers  and  real  developers  of  our  Great 
West.  And  had  it  not  been  for  the  infusion  of 
this  same  temper  into  the  builders  of  our  magnifi- 
cent modern  metallurgical  establishments,  we 
would  not  be  setting  the  pace  to  the  world  to- 
day. Had  our  Fritzes,  Thomsons,  Fricks,  and 


44  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

Carnegies  been  willing  only  to  follow  precedents 
and  foreign  tradition,  and  had  they  been  hide- 
bound by  the  teaching  of  the  schools,  our  output 
of  iron  and  steel  would  not  stand  first  on  the  list 
of  the  world's  production.  But  even  as  the  back- 
woodsman of  the  early  decades  of  the  last  century 
turned  from  his  plow  and  his  axe  to  make  iron  in 
his  own  way,  so  our  great  ironmasters,  not  being 
hampered  with  overmuch  reverence  for  the  past, 
have  fearlessly  expanded  their  furnaces,  applied 
new  mechanical  contrivances,  enlisted  electricity, 
and  in  many  other  ways  applied  the  inventions, 
which  they  have  been  willing  enough  to  accept 
from  abroad,  on  expanded  and  often  new  lines. 

Looking  at  the  field  of  mining  and  metallurgy 
to-day,  the  prominent  features  of  our  progress 
have  been,  first  of  all,  the  large  scale  on  which 
we  work,  and  secondly,  the  very  extensive  use  of 
machinery,  which  is  a  necessary  concomitant  to 
large  production  and  extensive  operation.  The 
large  scale  on  which  our  continent  is  built  and 
the  corresponding  size  of  its  natural  resources  have 
unquestionably  stirred  the  imagination  of  the 
people  and  excited  their  energies.  It  is  true 
that  had  we  not  possessed  the  natural  resources, 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School   45 

we  could  not  have  made  the  progress,  but  there 
are  other  peoples  who  have  possessed  resources 
and  allowed  them  to  lie  idle.  Whence,  there- 
fore, our  success?  It  is  due  in  great  part,  though 
not  altogether,  to  our  substitution  of  machinery 
for  hand-labor  in  every  department  of  life.  It 
has  become  a  guiding  and  controlling  principle 
with  every  American  that  it  is  more  economical 
to  use  your  wits  than  your  hands,  whether  in  the 
kitchen  or  the  workshop;  that  nature's  forces  are 
less  easily  exhausted  than  your  own;  and  that 
iron  and  steel  can  stand  a  heavier  strain  than 
human  bone  and  sinew.  Acting  on  this  principle, 
whenever  machinery  can  be  made  to  do  man's 
work,  the  instinct  of  the  American  is  to  devise 
some  means  of  bringing  this  substitution  about. 
When  scarcity  and  the  high  cost  of  labor  made 
labor-saving  machinery  a  necessity,  this  trait  of 
the  national  character  found  full  scope  for  its  ex- 
ercise, and  the  necessity  was  abundantly  satis- 
fied. The  material  of  which  our  buildings  are 
erected  is  hoisted  into  place  by  machinery,  and 
we  are  hoisted  into  our  offices  by  machinery. 
We  make  watches  by  machinery  for  a  few  cents 
apiece,  and  locomotives  for  as  few  thousand  dol- 


46  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

lars.  The  ore  for  our  furnaces  is  mined  by  ma- 
chinery, transported  to  the  mills  by  machinery, 
hoisted  to  the  furnace-top  by  machinery,  and 
dumped  into  the  furnace  by  machinery.  By 
machinery  the  liquid  product  is  carried  to  the 
converter,  blown  by  machinery  into  steel,  and 
the  steel,  by  a  continuous  mechanical  operation, 
is  wrought  into  manufactured  shapes  and  loaded 
on  the  cars.  Half  a  century  ago,  to  make  iron  in 
the  small  furnaces  then  in  blast,  at  least  six  days' 
labor  was  expended  for  a  ton  of  pig  iron  alone. 
To-day,  in  some  of  our  iron-mines,  4£  tons  of  ore 
is  the  tale  of  a  man's  daily  work.  In  the  large 
steel-works,  the  product  of  the  blast-furnace  de- 
partment is  3 1  tons  of  pig  iron,  and  that  of  the 
whole  manufacture  is  2  tons  of  finished  steel, 
m%de  from  the  ore,  per  man  employed,  including 
the  clerical  force.  In  the  field  of  copper,  the 
impulse  set  by  the  ironmaster  has  reacted  on  the 
more  sluggish  copper  metallurgist.  Instead  of 
the  small  brick  cupola,  in  which,  thirty  years  ago, 
it  was  thought  a  notable  feat  to  melt  10  tons  a 
day,  furnaces  are  now  running  which  consume 
from  400  to  500  tons  of  ore  per  day,  and  dis- 
charge their  valuable  contents  into  Bessemer  con- 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School   47 

verters,  which  blow  it  into  pure  copper  in  as  few 
minutes  as  it  used  to  take  days  to  roast  and 
re-roast  and  fuse  and  re-fuse  the  ore  when  the 
cupola  process  of  reduction  was  employed.  And 
the  reverberatory  furnaces  which  were  thought  to 
do  well  if  they  smelted  10  tons  a  day  have  been 
so  enlarged  that,  when  gaseous  fuel  is  used,  as 
much  as  150  tons  per  day  can  be  passed  through 
a  single  furnace.  Mechanical  dipping  and  ladling 
have  also  displaced  the  feebleness  of  men  in  bailing 
out  the  copper  from  the  copper  refinery  by  spoon- 
fuls. Machinery  has  not  so  completely  taken  the 
place  of  the  furnaceman  in  our  copper-works  as 
in  our  iron-  and  steel-mills;  but  every  year  wit- 
nesses a  steady  advance  in  that  direction;  and 
to-day  ore  mined  in  the  morning  can  be  loaded 
as  copper  into  the  cars  by  evening.  A  second- 
ary but  important  effect  of  the  extended  use  of 
machinery  is  the  necessity  which  it  forces  on 
the  manufacturer  of  producing  large  quantities. 
Take,  for  instance,  the  Bessemer  converter  as 
applied  to  copper.  The  smallest  converter  which 
can  well  be  used  economically  will  make  from 
1,000,000  to  1,500,000  pounds  of  copper  per 
month  from  a  45  to  50  per  cent  matte.  If, 


48  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

therefore,  this  limit  be  reached,  any  increase  of 
plant  almost  compels  a  doubling  of  the  output — 
which  would  bring  the  production  of  such  small 
works  up  to  the  total  for  the  whole  country  in 
1870. 

The  Yankee,  after  all,  has  been  the  creative 
genius  of  our  continent,  and  we  are  all  indebted 
to  him  for  the  infusion  into  the  national  life  not 
only  of  his  political  ideas,  but  of  his  mechanical 
proclivities.  The  original  Yankee  was  a  mechanic 
and  turned  his  talent  to  making  wooden  nutmegs 
and  wooden  clocks.  He  continues,  as  a  mechanic, 
to  make  clocks,  but  it  will  probably  be  a  German 
chemist  who  will  make  artificial  nutmegs.  The 
result  of  this  Yankee  infusion  is  that,  as  a  people, 
we  are  more  given  to  devising  mechanical  con- 
trivances than  to  synthetical  chemistry. 

Among  the  mechanical  factors  which  have  helped 
to  create  our  existing  metallurgical  industry, 
the  railroad  must  be  placed  first.  Through  its 
agency,  and  aided  by  the  steamer,  ores  can  be 
brought  to  the  fuel,  or  fuel  to  the  ores,  and  through 
this  concentration  of  crude  material  at  favorable 
localities  works  of  greater  magnitude  can  be 
erected  than  the  supply  of  crude  material  in  any 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School   49 

single  district  could  feed.  The  formation  of  our 
continent  facilitates  not  only  the  construction 
and  equipment  of  railroads  on  a  large  scale,  which 
minimizes  both  original  outlay  and  operating 
cost,  but  permits  of  the  adoption  of  changes  in 
obedience  to  the  demands  of  progress,  in  a  manner 
which  it  would  be  impossible  to  imitate  in  most 
foreign  lands.  A  train  can  run  from  New  York 
to  San  Francisco  without  once  entering  a  tunnel 
or  losing  sight  of  daylight,  and  therefore  structural 
changes  to  meet  increased  traffic  can  be  made 
with  less  disturbance  than  in  most  other  countries. 
Another  advantage  which  we  possess  is  that  the 
railroads  abroad  were  in  a  great  measure  built 
through,  or  to  connect,  large  and  populous  cities 
and  running  through  populous  districts,  when 
the  art  of  railroad  building  was  comparatively 
in  its  infancy.  With  us  the  great  expansion  of 
our  railroad  system  has  taken  place  when  we  had 
the  world's  experience  to  guide  us.  It  has  been 
no  small  gain  to  us  that  our  active  industrial  life 
really  commenced  contemporaneously  with  the 
advent  of  the  railroad;  that  it  has  been  built  upon 
the  railroad  as  a  substructure,  instead  of  the 
railroad  serving,  as  it  has  done  abroad,  as  a  mere 


50  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

adjunct.  Taking  the  railroad  as  a  part  of  our 
great  mining  and  metallurgical  machine,  and 
looking  upon  transportation  as  a  mere  branch  of 
productive  industry,  it  is  interesting  to  follow 
say  Lake  Superior  ore,  from  the  mine  back  to  the 
mine  as  steel  rail,  for  by  doing  so  we  get  a  clearer 
conception  of  the  all-important  part  machinery 
plays  in  the  cycle  of  our  mining  and  metallurgical 
operations.  The  railroad  which  connects  the 
Minnesota  iron  mines  with  Lake  Superior,  and 
the  huge  trains  in  which  their  ore  is  hauled 
from  Bessemer  to  Pittsburgh,  are  as  much 
mining  machinery  as  the  steam-shovels  by 
which  the  softer  ores  are  handled,  or  the 
hoists  by  which  the  deeper  ores  are  raised  to 
the  surface. 

While  scarcity  and  the  high  cost  of  labor  in  this 
country  make  labor-saving  machinery  a  necessity 
of  our  industrial  life,  and  while  the  necessity 
coincides  with  the  tendency  of  the  national  char- 
acter and  the  habits  of  the  people,  we  must  not 
flatter  ourselves  by  supposing  that  we  are  the 
only  people  that  use  machinery,  or  that  we  were 
the  first  to  make  all  these  applications  of  it,  still 
less  that  we  have  been  great  inventors  of  great 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School   51 

processes.  We  did  not  construct  the  first  rail- 
road; we  did  not  build  the  first  large  blast-furnace; 
we  were  not  the  first  to  apply  hot-blast  to  them. 
We  did  not  invent  the  Bessemer  converter  with 
its  beautiful  dependence  of  chemical  on  mechani- 
cal forces.  We  did  not  invent  the  Siemens- 
Martin  open-hearth  process,  nor  suggest  the  basic 
lining,  nor  invent  the  dynamo.  But  we  have 
applied  Faraday's  great  discovery  more  widely 
than  any  of  our  neighbors.  We  now  build  blast- 
furnaces so  much  larger  than  theirs  that  one 
single  Duquesne  stack  turns  out  annually  as 
much  as  the  804  little  furnaces  did  per  diem  or 
per  annum  in  1840,  and  we  drive  our  furnaces 
at  a  greater  speed — even  though  we  shorten  th£ir 
lives.  We  get  more  blows  out  of  our  converters 
(as  modified  by  Holly  and  others),  and  more 
work  out  of  our  rolling-mills  as  improved  and 
remodelled  by  such  men  as  John  Fritz.  We  can 
do  all  this,  not  because  we  understand  better  than 
our  rivals  the  laws  of  mechanics  or  of  electricity, 
or  have  studied  more  accurately  the  chemistry 
of  the  blast-furnace,  but  because  nature  has  sup- 
plied us  with  an  abundance  of  material  to  work 
upon,  and  because  we  live  up  to  the  principle  that 


52  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

whatever  our  wits  or  our  hands  find  to  do  we  do 
with  all  our  might. 

The  same  is  true  in  the  metallurgy  of  other 
metals.  The  invention  of  all  others  which  has 
helped  in  the  development  of  our  copper  resources 
— the  adoption  of  the  pneumatic  method  in  modi- 
fied converters — was  worked  out  abroad,  not  here; 
but  for  one  ton  of  Bessemer  copper  made  else- 
where we  make  100  in  this  country.  So  likewise 
the  electrolytic  method  of  refining  copper  was 
proposed,  used  and  substantially  perfected  in 
Europe,  but  works  are  considered  there  of  large 
size  which  will  turn  out  10,000,000  pounds  a 
year  of  refined  copper,  whereas  we  have  more 
than  one  with  a  capacity  of  far  over  100,000,000 
pounds. 

In  all  these  instances  our  progress  has  been 
mainly  due  to  the  employment  of  mechanical 
and  physical  forces  as  auxiliaries  to  chemical 
and  metallurgical  processes  to  a  greater  extent 
than  our  rivals;  and  therefore  I  feel  as  if  it  were 
superfluous  to  even  argue  that  a  knowledge  of 
mechanics  and  physics  is  as  absolutely  neces- 
sary to  the  miner  and  the  metallurgist  as  an 
acquaintance  with  mineralogy  or  the  principles  of 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School   53 

chemistry  and  metallurgy.  I  use  the  word 
"physics"  in  its  widest  sense.  Familiarity  with 
the  laws  of  heat  is  essential  if  we  would  use  eco- 
nomically steam  or  hot  air  as  motive  powers. 
Electricity  is  doing  our  work  under  ground  and 
above  ground;  striking  our  drills;  cutting  our 
coal;  propelling  our  cars;  pumping  our  water; 
hoisting  our  ore;  moving  our  machinery  in  every 
department,  generating  heat  for  the  decompo- 
sition of  our  more  infusible  chemical  compounds 
as  well  as  decomposing  solid  and  liquid  com- 
pounds in  our  many  electrolytic  operations; 
transmitting  the  power  from  localities  where  it 
can  be  cheaply  generated  to  far  distant  localities 
where  alone  it  can  be  economically  used;  lighting 
in  mines,  and  works  serving  our  ends  and  purposes 
in  a  hundred  ways,  but  destined,  as  we,  learn 
more  accurately  and  wisely  how  to  use  it,  to  be 
of  still  wider  service  in  the  future.  But  not 
only  have  we  harnessed  electricity  to  our  mining 
and  metallurgical  machinery;  we  use  ah*  and 
water  under  pressure  to  an  extent  that  makes 
it  necessary  that  a  mining  engineer  or  a  metal- 
lurgist, if  thoroughly  equipped,  should  be  ac- 
quainted, not  only  with  the  laws,  but  likewise 


54  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

with  the  application,  of  aerostatics  and  hyrdau- 
lics. 

Now,  gentlemen,  from  what  I  have  said  you 
will  gather  that,  as  essentials  to  success  as  miners 
and  metallurgists,  you  must  possess  not  only  a 
knowledge  of  what  was  formerly  supposed  to  be 
all  that  was  necessary,  namely,  of  mathemat- 
ics, chemistry,  mineralogy,  and  geology,  but  you 
must  be  acquainted  also  with  the  fundamental 
principles  and  facts  of  mechanics  and  physics; 
for  the  educational  equipment  of  a  successful 
miner  and  metallurgist  to-day  is  as  much  more 
intricate  than  it  formerly  was  as  the  magnificent 
steam-engine,  with  which  he  will  hoist  his  ore, 
is  more  complex  than  the  windlass  or  the  horse- 
whim,  with  which  the  primitive  miner  worked. 
As  I  have  always  said,  without  machinery — 
and  machinery  of  the  very  highest  type — we 
could  not  handle  the  quantities,  without  which 
our  large  organizations  could  not  be  supported. 
If  we  compare,  for  instance,  the  125,000  tons 
of  iron  made  in  1840  with  the  17,000,000  tons 
made  to-day,  you  have  a  standard  by  which 
you  estimate  the  difference  between  the  past  and 
the  present. 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School    55 

But  while  the  applications  of  the  principles  of 
mechanics  have  alone  enabled  us  to  work  on 
such  a  gigantic  scale,  the  demand  for  quality 
has  meanwhile  become  quite  as  exacting,  and 
quality  can  be  attained  only  by  the  application 
of  chemical  analysis  to  the  elucidation  of  chemi- 
cal laws.  As  professional  men  you  will  have  to 
do,  therefore,  with  the  extremes  of  large  masses 
and  extremely  minute  quantities,  the  quality 
of  the  large  mass  being  dependent  upon  the 
presence  or  absence,  and  the  play  of  extremely 
minute  quantities,  of  certain  foreign  bodies.  To 
determine  the  existence  of  these  and  to  explain 
their  effects,  you  must  be  more  or  less  familiar 
with  chemistry  and  its  allied  branches.  Thus 
if  you  are  to  handle  ores  and  metals  in  bulk, 
you  can  do  so  only  through  a  knowledge  of  me- 
chanics; if  you  are  to  secure  uniformity  in  qual- 
ity, you  can  do  so  primarily  only  through  the 
agency  of  chemistry.  It  is  not  so  many  years 
ago  that  even  some  of  the  largest  metallurgical 
establishments  in  this  country  worked  by  rule 
of  thumb,  without  the  aid  of  a  chemist,  for  when 
I  came  to  Pennsylvania  in  1875  no  chemist  was 
employed  by  what  was  then  one  of  the  largest 


56  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

manufacturers  of  both  pig  iron  and  malleable 
iron  in  the  East.  But  since  the  introduction  of 
the  Bessemer  process,  in  which  the  making  of 
good  steel  depends  on  the  presence  or  absence 
of  minute  quantities  of  carbon,  silicon,  and  phos- 
phorus; and  since  the  peculiar  properties  con- 
ferred on  steel  by  minute  quantities  of  nickel, 
magnesium,  aluminum,  and  other  metals  are 
being  taken  advantage  of,  metallurgical  works 
without  a  chemist,  or  a  metallurgist  without  a 
knowledge  of  chemistry,  has  become  an  anachro- 
nism. 

Horror  at  mastering  such  an  appalling  volume 
of  knowledge,  as  would  have  to  be  acquired, 
if  all  the  facts,  phenomena,  and  theories  of  all 
these  sciences  had  to  be  packed  into  the  brain 
of  a  metallurgist  and  miner,  might  well  deter 
any  of  us  from  undertaking  the  task  of  qualify- 
ing ourselves  for  creditably  filling  the  humblest 
place  in  the  ranks  of  the  profession.  The  utmost 
that  we  can  do  is  to  familiarize  ourselves  with 
the  main  principles  of  the  sciences  I  have  referred 
to,  so  that  when  we  come  to  occupy,  as  I  hope 
most  of  you  will  do,  prominent  positions  in  one 
corner  or  another  of  the  industrial  world,  you 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School   57 

will  at  least  be  able  to  map  out  the  lines  on  which 
work  is  to  be  done,  and  be  able  to  judge  whether 
the  technical  specialists  whom  you  employ  are 
fit  to  do  the  work  which  you  have  assigned  them. 

It  is  true  in  our  profession,  as  in  medicine,  that 
a  specialist  who  is  not  more  or  less  of  a  general 
practitioner  is  a  dangerous  man.  At  the  same 
time  the  range  of  medical  science  has  been  so 
extended  that  the  specialist  has  become  a  neces- 
sity. So  in  the  walk  of  life  which  you  intend 
pursuing,  even  if  you  decide  to  devote  yourself 
and  direct  your  studies  to  some  special  branch, 
you  cannot  escape  the  necessity,  if  you  are  to  be 
useful  men,  of  being  generally  informed  on  all 
of  them.  And  if  you  take  up  no  special  branch, 
you  will  find  yourself  seriously  handicapped,  un- 
less you  know  enough  of  every  specialty  to  avoid 
being  a  mere  slave  of  your  special  adviser. 

In  any  case,  what  you  want  to  study  are  the 
principles  which  underlie  such  sciences  as  come 
within  the  range  of  your  studies,  rather  than  the 
applications.  The  applications  change — the  prin- 
ciples never  change.  For  instance,  the  type 
of  furnace  used  to-day  is  likely  to  be  discarded 
to-morrow.  The  Bessemer  converter  is  being 


58  American  Mining  and  Metallurgy,  and 

rapidly  displaced  by  the  open-hearth  furnace. 
The  top  furnace  gases,  which  were  only  recently 
supposed  to  be  turned  to  their  most  economical 
use  in  heating  hot-blast  stoves,  are  now  freed 
from  certain  valuable  by-products  and  used  to 
drive  large  gas-engines.  Hot  blast,  secured  by 
the  combustion  of  top  furnace  gases,  and  hot-blast 
stoves  were  hailed  as  the  consummation  of  all  econ- 
omies. To-day  frozen  blast  and  the  consequent 
condensation  of  oxygen  is  the  aim  of  the  iron- 
master. Thus  in  a  thousand  ways  nature's  forces 
and  products  are  turned  to  newer  and  more  eco- 
nomical uses.  What  you  want  to  study  are  the 
forces  themselves,  and  to  be  ever  on  the  alert 
to  make  them  do  your  special  work. 

And,  as  you  will  find,  your  real  education  will 
commence  when  you  leave  college  and  go  out 
into  the  world  and  have  a  wider  field  of  observa- 
tion than  you  possess  here.  But  if  you  are  to 
derive  the  fullest  advantage  from  this  wider  field, 
it  must  be  by  not  omitting  an  opportunity  of 
picking  up  stray  pieces  of  knowledge,  by  observing 
the  results  of  other  people's  experience.  I  used 
to  have  a  professor  of  Greek  who  occasionally 
preached  to  us  suggestive  sermons  from  humble 


The  Equipments  of  a  Training  School    59 

topics,  on  texts  which  were  generally  suggested 
by  the  wisdom  of  the  Greeks.  I  recollect  his 
once  breaking  off  his  lecture  to  descant  on  the  text: 

"Pussy  cat,  Pussy  cat,  where  have  you  been? 
I've  been  to  London  to  see  the  Queen. 
Pussy  cat,  Pussy  cat,  what  saw  you  there? 
I  saw  a  little  Mouse  under  the  Chair." 

The  moral  hardly  needs  to  be  enforced.  Our 
first  duty  as  professional  men,  no  matter  where 
we  are  or  what  we  go  to  see,  is  to  have  our  eyes 
open,  and  our  minds  retentive  of  what  to  us  must 
be  the  all-important  objects  of  our  professional 
"life — gathering  professional  facts  and  professional 
experience.  When  Pussy  cat  at  last  got  to 
Court,  she  forgot  Royalty  and  its  state  and  its 
circumstance,  in  attending  to  her  particular  func- 
tion— watching  the  "little  Mouse  under  the 
Chair."  So  in  our  case,  no  pleasure,  no  dis- 
traction, no  self-gratification  should  ever  stand 
in  the  way  of  entering  a  mine,  visiting  works, 
picking  up  a  scrap  here  and  a  scrap  there  of  pro- 
fessional information,  and  learning  something 
from  others'  success  as  well  as  others'  failure. 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 


Address  given  before  the  Michigan  College  School  of  Mines. 
April  22,  1904. 


I  DO  not  unduly  magnify  our  office  as  miners 
and  metallurgists  when  I  claim  for  ourselves, 
as  winners  of  its  mineral  constituents  from  the 
earth's  crust  and  producers  of  the  useful  metals 
from  the  raw  products  of  the  mines,  a  somewhat 
more  dignified  position  than  that  of  the  mere 
merchant  who  disposes  of  our  handiwork.  But 
when  we  reduce  our  own  and  his  energies  to  a 
common  motive,  we  both  stand  on  the  same 
plane  as  money-makers. 

It  may  be  an  inglorious  position,  but  while  we 
may,  and  should,  personally  work  with  higher 
aims  than  the  sordid  considerations  of  personal 
gain,  as  employees  and  representatives  of  capital 
we  must  make  money,  or  the  enterprises  we  man- 
age will  very  soon  become  derelicts  on  the  ocean 

of  industry  or  ignorance.    In  trying  to  do  so  you 

60 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      61 

will  come  face  to  face  with  many  problems  and 
perplexities  which  may  even  assume  the  gravity 
of  cases  of  conscience. 

I  do  not  speak  of  direct  bribes,  nor  of  the  insidi- 
ous bribes  which  are  often  offered  under  the  guise 
of  contingent  fees;  but  of  the  feeling  of  guilt 
which  oppresses  a  conscientious  miner  or  metal- 
lurgist, when  he  is  knowingly,  and  therefore  will- 
fully, wasting  the  treasures  of  nature,  of  which 
he  should  be  the  conservator. 

The  subject  is  a  wide  one  and  of  many  phases. 
For  certain  prominent  shortcomings,  such  as  the 
loss  of  heat,  and  therefore  waste  of  coal,  in  gener- 
ating power  through  the  agency  of  steam  and  for 
the  waste  of  power  in  its  transmission,  when  once 
generated,  we  can  hardly  be  held  responsible,  as 
the  remedies  for  these  fall  within  the  province  of 
the  mechanical  engineer.  But  there  are,  unfortu- 
nately, too  many  wastes  for  which  we  cannot 
shift  the  blame  to  the  shoulders  of  others,  and  of 
some  of  these  I  wish  to  speak  to  you. 

Theoretically,  every  valuable  ingredient  of  an 
ore  should  be  recovered.  The  day  may,  and 
will,  come  when  this  consummation  of  one  of  the 
higher  ideals  of  metallurgy  will  be  reached;  but 


62       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

to-day  it  is  unattainable,  partly  because  our 
methods  are  incomplete  or  defective,  partly  be- 
cause economic  considerations  forbid  us  to  recover 
by-products  where  there  is  no  market  for  them. 
The  latter  excuse  is,  however,  so  rapidly  disap- 
pearing under  the  extension  of  transportation 
facilities  and  the  reduction  of  freight  rates  that 
ere  long  it  will  be  our  fault  only  if  we  are  enlisted 
in  the  great  army  of  wasters,  instead  of  hi  the 
select  company  of  the  salvage  corps. 

In  the  recollection  and  experience  of  many  of 
us,  such  notable  advances  have  been  made  towards 
the  consummation  of  what  we  all  have  at  heart, 
that  there  is  reason  to  hope  the  most  sanguine 
expectations  of  the  most  enthusiastic  believer  in 
the  salvation  of  nature's  resources  will  be  real- 
ized. Half  a  century  ago  every  blast-furnace  in 
the  Black  Country  of  England,  and  in  our  own 
then  insignificant  iron  centers,  was  a  torch,  belch- 
ing forth  the  flame,  and  the  smoke  and  gas  which 
are  now  used  to  heat  the  blast  in  the  stoves,  and 
to  raise  the  steam  for  the  blowing-engines,  thus 
reducing  the  consumption  of  carbon  in  extracting 
pig  iron  from  its  ores  to  about  one-quarter  of  what 
formerly  was  consumed. 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      63 

It  was  later  still  before  Mr.  Bessemer  suc- 
ceeded practically  in  applying  the  heat  generated 
by  the  combustion  of  the  carbon  and  silicon  in 
the  pig  iron  to  the  conversion  of  cast  iron  into 
steel.  It  only  remains  to  apply  the  waste  heat 
from  the  converter  to  the  generation  of  power  for 
operating  the  blowing-engine  to  make  this  cycle 
complete. 

Another  example  of  the  utilization  of  the  fuel 
in  an  ore  for  the  separation  of  its  valuable  con- 
stituents is  afforded  by  the  treatment  of  pyrite. 
Pyritic  smelting  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  pass- 
ed beyond  the  stage  of  incipient  development. 
Yesterday,  hot  blast  was  declared  necessary. 
To-day,  cold  blast  at  high  pressure  is  found  more 
advantageous,  but  such  progress  is  being  made 
by  many  metallurgists,  the  world  over,  to  place 
pyritic  smelting  on  a  sound  technical  footing,  that 
before  long  we  should  see  not  only  the  sulphur  in 
sulphuretted  ores  used  to  smelt  the  charge,  but 
the  sulphur  escaping  from  the  stack  and  the  cop- 
per converter  recovered  as  acid  by  the  contact 
or  some  other  process. 

But  a  still  more  instructive  example  of  the  sav- 
ing, not  only  of  money,  but  of  the  valuable  con- 


64       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

stituents  of  pyrite  has  been  worked  out  in 
Spain. 

Till  within  a  few  years  the  minerals  from  the 
great  lenses  of  pyrite  at  Rio  Tinto  and  Tharsis 
were  sorted  and  the  portions  richest  in  copper 
shipped  to  the  chemical  centers  of  the  world. 
The  poorer  ore  was  roasted  in  heaps  for  the  pur- 
pose of  partially  sulphatizing,  and  extracting  as 
much  of  the  copper  by  leaching  as  possible. 

The  pyrite  exported  is  treated  by  the  so-called 
Henderson  process,  which,  however,  should  be 
more  justly  credited  to  Longmaid.  After  kiln 
roasting  the  crude  ore,  in  order  to  extract  most 
of  the  sulphur  for  acid  making,  the  cinders  are 
crushed  and  roasted  with  salt,  whereby  the  cop- 
per is  almost  completely  chloridized,  and  ren- 
dered soluble  in  the  weak  hydrochloric  acid 
liquor  obtained  by  passing  the  leach  liquors 
through  a  condensing  tower  connected  with  the 
roasting-furnace.  Iron  is  used  as  the  precipitant 
of  the  copper,  but  before  the  cupriferous  liquors 
pass  to  the  copper  precipitating-tanks  the  silver 
and  some  of  the  gold,  which  have  been  dissolved 
with  the  copper,  are  separated  by  iodide  of  zinc, 
as  first  proposed  by  Claudet.  The  tank  residues, 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      65 

practically  free  from  sulphur  and  copper,  consist 
of  very  pure  iron  oxide  which  was  formerly  used 
as  fettling  in  the  puddling-furnace,  but  now 
enters  the  blast-furnace.  Thus  the  sulphur,  the 
copper  and  the  precious  metals  and  the  iron  are 
all  more  or  less  perfectly  recovered.  And  we 
have  here,  therefore,  an  instance  of  an  attempt  to 
save  all  the  useful  elements  of  the  ore.  But  till 
the  fuel  used  in  roasting  can  be  eliminated  and 
till  the  salt  consumed  in  chloridizing  and  the  iron 
in  precipitating  are  regenerated,  or  recovered  in 
some  valuable  form,  the  series  of  operations, 
looked  at  from  an  economical  point  of  view,  is 
incomplete. 

The  treatment,  however,  of  the  second-class 
ores  at  the  mine  is  what  I  wish  particularly  to 
call  your  attention  to,  as  it  conveys  several  les- 
sons. The  manufacturing  chemists  of  Europe 
were  driven  to  the  use  of  pyrite  about  half  a  cen- 
tury ago  by  the  unwise  action  of  the  Sicilian 
government  in  imposing  a  heavy  export  duty  on 
brimstone.  Three  notable  producers  of  pyrite 
soon  entered  the  market — the  Mason  and  Barry 
mines  of  Portugal,  and  the  Tharsis  and  Rio  Tinto, 


66       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

on  the  same  chain  of  deposits  in  the  province  of 
Huelva,  Spain. 

The  Portuguese  government  forbade  the  roast- 
ing of  pyrite  by  the  Mason-Barry  Co.,  which, 
therefore,  was  forced  to  screen  and  export  all  its 
lump  ore.  It  was  soon  discovered  that  decom- 
position set  up  in  the  piles  of  raw  fine  screenings, 
when  they  were  wetted,  resulting  in  the  extrac- 
tion of  the  copper. 

The  fact,  however,  was  overlooked  as  of  any 
importance  by  the  two  great  neighbors  of  the 
Portuguese  company.  They  were  building  their 
second-class  ore  into  huge  heaps  and  roasting  off 
the  sulphur  at  enormous  loss  to  themselves  and 
the  destruction  of  all  surrounding  vegetation. 
The  Tharsis  company  was  the  first  to  correct  its 
mistake,  but  though  the  Tharsis  and  Rio  Tinto 
properties  are  only  a  few  miles  apart,  it  was  years 
before  the  Rio  Tinto  was  willing  to  abandon  its 
old,  obsolete  and  extravagant  methods. 

The  result  is  now  that  both  at  Tharsis  and  Rio 
Tinto  two  or  three  million  tons  of  raw  pyrite  a 
year  are  built  into  heaps  and  irrigated  at  intervals 
for  four  years,  by  which  time  the  copper  is  prac- 
tically extracted.  The  piles  shrink  in  size  by 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      67 

about  one-quarter  of  their  weight,  but  when 
broken  down  for  shipment  to  the  chemical  works 
of  Europe  and  this  country  the  remaining  three- 
fourths  consists  of  lumps  of  iron  pyrite,  retain- 
ing their  original  shape  and  structure,  but  of 
somewhat  higher  percentage  of  sulphur  than 
before  lixiviation. 

I  shall  not  discuss  the  interesting  reactions  that 
occur  in  the  heaps  during  the  four  years  of  lixi- 
viation, nor  the  still  more  interesting  bearing  of 
the  whole  process  on  the  problem  of  the  solution 
of  metals  in  and  from  the  earth's  crusts,  and  their 
re-disposition  as  secondary  ores.  What  I  want 
to  bring  out  is  that  there  are  saved  to  the  world 
annually  about  1,000,000  tons  of  sulphur,  of 
which  we  get  our  share  for  the  manufacture  of 
the  world's  most  indispensable  chemical  com- 
pound, sulphuric  acid — sulphur  which  heretofore 
simply  polluted  the  atmosphere. 

At  Rio  Tinto  there  are  in  their  two  yards  about 
20,000,000  tons  of  badly  roasted  pyrite  in  heaps, 
collected  during  some  thirty  years,  still  slowly 
undergoing  oxidation  and  yielding  a  little  copper, 
but  from  which  7,000,000  tons  of  sulphur  should 
have  been  recovered,  whose  value,  at  lOc.  per 


68       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

unit,  would  not  have  been  less  than  $70,000,000 
had  the  company's  metallurgists  been  keenly 
alive  to  what  was  actually  occurring  elsewhere, 
even  on  their  own  Iberian  peninsula. 

There  is  no  greater  mistake  than  to  work  with 
too  intense  concentration  and  with  your  vision 
too  firmly  focused  on  your  own  enterprise.  Tech- 
nical travel  displaces  many  an  illusion  and  preju- 
dice; and  during  your  travels  you  will  learn 
generally  more  than  you  would  from  books;  for 
while  few  practical  men  will  actually  refuse  to 
communicate  their  experience  when  asked,  espe- 
cially if  you  also  reciprocate  by  communicating 
yours,  still  fewer  are  eager  to  take  the  trouble  to 
publish  their  observations  and  their  practice, 
even  when  their  employers  allow  them. 

Unfortunately  there  are  a  few  employers  who 
think  that  they  can  gain  something  by  imposing 
secrecy  on  their  officials.  You  will  generally 
find  they  are  willing  enough  to  try  and  pump 
you  dry;  but  they  forget  that  the  law  of  give  and 
take  is  of  universal  force. 

The  waste  of  sulphur  is  not  confined  to  Spain. 
The  clouds  which  hang  over  Bergen  Point  and 
the  northern  part  of  Staten  Island  in  the  very 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      69 

neighborhood  of  New  York  are  a  very  visible 
and  sensible  protest  against  our  own  waste  of 
that  element. 

A  significant  example  of  the  recovery  of  all 
the  valuable  constituents  of  an  ore  is  afforded 
by  the  present  treatment  of  that  complex  min- 
eral, franklinite,  mixed  with  willemite-zincite, 
by  the  New  Jersey  Zinc  Co.  The  minerals  con- 
sist of  iron,  zinc,  and  manganese.  Every  attempt 
to  extract  the  zinc  by  the  Belgian  method  was 
futile,  as  the  iron  melted  the  retorts,  but  now 
that  the  Wetherell  process  of  magnetic  separa- 
tion has  been  applied,  a  very  pure  zinc  ore — 
the  willemite-zincite — is  recovered,  zinc  oxide 
is  made  from  the  franklinite,  and  the  resulting 
iron  and  manganese  are  melted  into  spiegeleisen. 
As  an  iron  ore  the  mixed  mineral  was  of  little 
or  no  value,  because  associated  with  so  much 
zinc;  as  a  zinc  ore  it  was  worthless  because  of 
its  iron  contents,  and  ten  per  cent  of  manganese 
added  nothing  to  its  attractiveness.  Each  of 
these  metals  was  simply  a  deleterious  waste 
product  to  the  others.  Now  each  adds  value 
to  its  associate. 

Such  instances  as  these  inspire  the  hope  that 


yo       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

the  self-interest  of  capital  directed  by  the  teach- 
ing of  the  members  of  our  profession  will  soon 
remove  from  the  technical  industries  the  stigma 
of  wittingly  continuing  to  practice  needless  waste. 
But  there  remains  much  to  be  done  even  along 
lines  already  followed  and  methods  already  prac- 
ticed. Take  for  example  the  waste  of  coal  in  min- 
ing it,  and  the  appalling  waste  of  by-products 
in  coking  it. 

For  many  years  after  our  limited  stock  of  an  - 
thracite  in  Pennsylvania  was  first  mined  and 
marketed,  the  proportion  saved  was  only  30  per 
cent  of  the  vein  mined.  The  balance  was  either 
left  as  pillars  underground,  which  were  never 
extracted,  or  thrown  as  waste  into  mountains  of 
culm.  Of  late  the  figures  have  been  nearly 
reversed,  for  about  60  per  cent  is  recovered, 
and  only  40  per  cent  is  lost,  a  saving  due 
to  somewhat  better  mining,  and  to  the  burning 
of  culm  on  perforated  grates  by  forced  draft.  But 
this  loss  by  no  means  represents  the  total,  for  in 
many  localities,  ^in  extracting  the  coal  from  the 
best  of  the  veins,  coal  in  parallel  veins  is  irre- 
trievably lost,  either  in  whole  or  in  part  by  caving 
and  crushing. 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      71 

The  demand  for  anthracite  as  a  domestic  fuel 
being  urgent,  and  the  supply  being  necessarily 
met  from  one  limited  region,  arrest  of  produc- 
tion can  hardly  be  permitted  in  order  to  study 
and  apply  improvements  in  methods  of  mining 
and  preparation.  This  explanation  may  be  ac- 
cepted as  a  partial  excuse  for  the  waste  of  this 
rare  and  invaluable  fuel.  But  no  such  justifi- 
cation exists  for  the  waste  of  the  by-products 
in  the  coking  of  bituminous  coal;  since  the  utiliza- 
tion of  the  waste  gases  was  practiced  long  before 
the  introduction  of  the  Otto  type  of  retort  ovens, 
which  is  merely  an  amplification  of  the  illumi- 
nating-gas plant. 

There  is  made  in  this  country  about  22,000,000 
tons  of  coke,  of  which  less  than  2,000,000  tons 
are  made  in  by-product  ovens.  The  actual 
proportion  is  5.4  per  cent  of  the  whole,  while 
94.6  per  cent  is  made  in  non-by-product  ovens. 
The  coke  is  made  from  34,000,000  tons  of  coal, 
from  which  about  1,800,000  tons  alone  yield 
by-products. 

Average  coal  in  its  coking  yields  per  ton  as  by- 
product about  20  Ibs.  of  ammonium  sulphate, 
when  the  ammonia  is  recovered  as  sulphate,  and 


72       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

10  gals,  of  tar.  If  these  by-products  were  re- 
covered from  all  the  coal  coked,  there  would  be 
saved  about  340,000,000  gals,  of  tar,  worth  at  $5 
per  ton  $8,168,000,  and  ammonia  sufficient  to 
make  340,000  tons  of  ammonium  sulphate,  worth 
at  $60  per  ton  $20,400,000;  and  allowing  60 
per  cent  of  the  gas  to  be  consumed  in  heating 
of  the  ovens,  there  would  be  available  for  power 
140,000,000,000  feet  of  gas,  each  cubic  foot  of 
which,  if  burnt,  would  yield  about  500  B.T.U. 
of  heat. 

The  total  volume  of  gas  now  wasted,  therefore, 
after  thus  deducting  60  per  cent,  would  give  us 
72,000,000,000,000  B.T.U.,  and  allowing  12,000 
B.T.U.  per  horse-power  hour,  6,000,000,000  horse- 
power hours,  if  burnt  in  gas  engines — or  far  more 
than  the  power  now  actually  produced  from  the 
Falls  of  Niagara.  The  figures  of  loss  are  startling 
and  appalling.  The  tar  wasted  would  enable  us 
to  outstrip  Germany's  famous  lead  in  the  manu- 
facture of  aniline  dyes  and  other  hydrocarbon 
products,  if  we  brought  Germany's  perseverance 
and  skill  and  chemical  science  to  bear  upon  the 
industry.  The  gas  would  yield  ammonia  enough 
to  require  the  multiplication  of  our  acid  and  fer- 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      73 

tilizing  works  for  making  cheap  manures  with 
which  to  revive  our  depleted  prairie  lands,  and 
power  enough,  if  distributed,  to  create  new  cen- 
ters of  manufacturing  activity. 

If  Germany  can  afford  the  expense  of  coking 
ovens  of  the  retort  type,  with  the  object  of  mak- 
ing so  good  a  coke  out  of  her  inferior  coals  that 
they  can  compete  with  our  own  in  the  markets  of 
Mexico,  surely  we  can  do  the  same.  And  we 
would  do  so,  were  it  not  for  the  reckless  haste  to 
make  money,  and  make  it  at  once  with  whatever 
appliances  we  possess. 

None  are  so  willing  as  our  own  manufacturers 
to  discard  an  old  plant  and  replace  it  at  any  cost 
with  new,  but  they  hate  complications;  and 
therefore  it  will  take  time  to  persuade  our  coke 
manufacturers  to  complicate  the  simple  process 
of  coke  making  in  the  bee-hive  oven — as  long  as 
it  makes  a  good  coke  out  of  our  splendid  coals — 
with  all  kinds  of  chemical  processes,  which  must 
be  operated  by  chemical  experts  who  are  even 
more  obnoxious  than  their  processes. 

But  the  gains  are  so  obvious  that  prejudice 
must  rapidly  vanish,  and  we  shall  soon  see  two 
great  changes  taking  place.  More  coke  will  be 


74       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

made  at  the  works  where  it  is  consumed,  for  ooal 
can  be  transported  more  cheaply  than  coke,  on 
account  of  its  lesser  bulk,  and  it  does  not  suffer 
in  transportation,  if  intended  for  coking;  whereas, 
coke  loses  in  volume  and  efficiency  by  attrition 
in  carriage. 

If,  moreover,  the  25  to  30  per  cent  of  volatile 
gases  given  off,  even  from  the  bee-hive  ovens,  are 
burnt,  as  they  issue  from  the  oven,  under  steam 
boilers,  or,  better  still,  exploded,  after  purifica- 
tion, in  gas  engines,  the  total  weight  of  combus- 
tibles carried  from  the  mine  will  be  burnt  either 
as  coke  in  the  blast-furnace  or  as  gas  for  the  gener- 
ation of  power. 

There  may  be  furnace  plants  in  localities  where 
the  by-products  of  the  coke  oven  are  valueless, 
though  they  are  becoming  fewer  with  the  exten- 
sion of  our  railroad  system.  But  even  so,  it  will 
generally  be  found  cheaper  to  coke  the  coal  at  the 
furnaces  where  it  is  to  be  consumed,  and  then 
utilize  the  escaping  gases  for  power  purposes,  than 
to  haul,  on  the  same  trains  from  the  distant  coal- 
fields, coal  for  generating  power  and  the  costly 
bulky  coke  already  wastefully  deprived  of  its  vol- 
atile gases. 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy       75 

The  utilization  of  the  gas  at  the  great  centers 
of  the  coke  industry,  as  in  the  Connellsville  dis- 
trict, for  the  generation  of  power,  would  formerly 
have  been  impossible;  but  now  that  long  dis- 
tance electrical  transmission  under  high  voltage 
has  been  practically  effected,  there  is  no  excuse 
for  wasting  the  energy  which  escapes  with  the 
gas  from  25,000,000  tons  of  coal  coked  in  Penn- 
sylvania alone,  where  power  is  in  such  demand.* 

When  Siemens  introduced  his  gas  producer  he 
imagined  the  time  would  come  when  gas  instead 
of  solid  fuel  would  be  sent  from  the  mine  to  the 
consumer.  The  conception  has  never  material- 
ized, for  obvious  reasons.  But  none  of  the  ob- 
jections which  prevail  against  the  transportation 
of  gas  hold  good  against  the  transmission  of  the 
more  subtle  mysterious  agent — electricity.  And 
therefore,  with  the  interposition  of  only  one — or 
for  certain  purposes,  two — conversions  and  trans- 

*  Erskine  Ramsay,  in  a  paper  on  the  "  Generation  of  Steam 
from  the  Waste  Gases  of  Coke  Ovens,"  communicated  to  the 
Alabama  Industrial  and  Scientific  Society,  Vol.  Ill,  1893. 
calculates,  from  his  experience  at  the  Pratt  Mine  coke  ovens 
in  Alabama,  that  if  the  18,000  Connellsville  ovens  were  run 
to  their  capacity  of  50,000  tons  of  coal  daily,  the  escaping 
gases  would  be  equivalent  to  18,000  tons  of  coal  burnt  under 
steam  boilers. 


76       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

formations,  we  shall  sooner  or  later  see  Siemens' 
dream  realized;  when  the  gas  generated  at  the 
mine  will  be  transmitted  as  electric  energy  to  the 
consumer,  and  the  smoke  nuisance,  the  ash  nui- 
sance, and  a  host  of  other  nuisances,  if  they  do  not 
disappear  from  our  cities  and  our  homes  will  be 
notably  reduced. 

The  effect  of  the  saving  of  waste  on  the  price  of 
our  staple  metals  will  be  incalculable.  In  fact, 
when  all  the  volatile  products  of  the  coke  oven 
and  of  the  blast-furnace,  which  are  now  saved  in 
Scotland,  are  deprived  of  their  heat-giving  prop- 
erties, and  their  chemical  constituents,  and  when 
the  slag  as  well  as  the  metal  have  returned  their 
heat  to  man  instead  of  to  the  atmosphere,  and 
the  slag  itself  has  been  turned  into  cement,  or 
some  other  useful  article,  it  will  be  a  question  as 
to  whether  the  pig  iron  is  the  principal  object  of 
manufacture,  or  one  of  the  by-products. 

There  is  another  waste  for  which  we  are  respon- 
sible, but  for  the  removal  of  which  I  cannot  see  so 
speedy  an  outlook;  I  mean  the  burying  of  our 
forests  in  our  mines.  I  do  not  know  how  many 
feet  of  lumber,  board  measure,  are  actually  and 
irrevocably  covered  up  in  your  copper  and  iron 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      77 

mines,  though  I  know  how  intelligently  and  ear- 
nestly your  iron  masters  have  worked  to  stop 
this  heinous  waste  by  replacing  timber  with  steel 
and  concrete,  but  I  am  ashamed  to  say  that 
twenty-five  feet  of  Oregon  pine  replace  every  ton 
of  copper  ore  we  extract  from  the  Copper  Queen. 
There  the  quantity  used  is  exceptionally  large, 
for  the  ore  is  in  great  measure  extracted  from  soft, 
irregular  masses  embedded  hi  a  wet  clay  matrix, 
and  square  setting,  as  a  measure  of  safety,  has  to 
precede  the  ore  extraction.  We  cannot  see  how 
to  actually  displace  this  expensive  and  wasteful 
method  by  back  filling  or  caving,  and  yet  it  seems 
iniquitous  to  waste  so  valuable  and  vanishing  a 
natural  product  as  timber  in  recovering  another 
of  perhaps  less  national  importance. 

The  preservation  of  our  forests  and  their  per- 
petuation, by  replanting,  are  of  course  a  subject 
which  you  in  Michigan  must  have  very  near  at 
heart,  and  therefore  to  Sweden  you  should  look 
for  lessons  in  the  economical  use  of  your  forest 
resources.  There  is  still  in  operation  a  public 
company — the  Kopparberg — whose  charter  dates 
back  to  the  thirteenth  century,  and  which  de- 
pends still  for  its  prosperity  on  the  lumber  cut 


78       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

from  the  tracts  of  forests  which  then  came  into 
its  possession.  Nothing  is  rejected.  What  is 
not  used  for  pulp  making  and  dimension  lumber 
is  devoted  to  metallurgical  purposes — converted 
either  into  charcoal  for  the  blast-furnace  or  into 
gas  for  steel  making  in  the  open  hearth  furnace. 
Not  a  twig  nor  a  grain  of  sawdust  goes  to  waste; 
and  the  price  Sweden  obtains  for  her  steel  is  her 
reward  for  and  warrants  the  care  and  the  cost 
involved.  It  also  goes  without  saying  that  a 
tree  is  planted  to  replace  the  tree  cut  down.  But 
in  Sweden  men  and  their  children  are  willing  to 
wait  till  a*  tree  grows.  Here  we  are  not.  And 
there  the  State,  conscious  of  its  immortality  and 
provident  of  the  national  resources  for  future 
generations,  puts  some  checks  on  the  selfishness  of 
the  individual  who  looks  only  to  to-day.  This 
phase  of  the  subject  involving  the  duty  of  the 
State  to  interfere  with  the  free  action  of  the  in- 
dividual and  with  the  reckless  waste  of  the  na- 
tion's resources  is,  I  know,  a  delicate  one,  yet 
none  the  less  momentous.  But  to  discuss  it 
would  lead  us  far  afield  of  our  present  object, 
which  is  to  consider  cursorily  our  individual  obli- 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      79 

gation  to  use  our  best  endeavors  towards  minim- 
izing the  evil. 

My  own  experience  has  been  largely  gained  in 
working  mines  and  treating  the  copper  ores  of 
the  West,  and  dates  back  to  the  period  when 
both  Arizona  and  the  Butte  copper  interests  were 
in  their  infancy.  I  have  therefore  observed  the 
heavy  costs  involved  through  losses  which  are 
incidental  to  inexperience,  and  which  must  neces- 
sarily occur  during  the  premature  development 
of  mines  on  a  large  scale.  I  can  therefore  also 
appreciate  the  impossibility  of  avoiding  them 
altogether.  The  few  remarkable  instances,  out 
of  many,  which  I  have  quoted,  of  waste  on  a 
national  scale,  it  may  not  be  within  the  power  of 
many  or  of  any  of  us  to  remedy,  but  we  shall  all 
have  to  consider  again  and  again  what  provision 
can  be  made  to  preserve,  for  future  treatment, 
valuable  material  which  at  the  moment  is  vir- 
tually waste. 

It  is  difficult  to  forecast  the  future  and  to  an- 
ticipate the  economical  charges  which  time  will 
bring  with  it;  but  of  this  we  may  be  certain,  that 
the  drift  of  events  will  be  inevitably  toward  lower 
treatment  charges  and  therefore  the  utilization 


80       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

not  only  of  lower-grade  ores,  but  of  what  is  to-day 
actually  rejected  as  waste.  In  mining,  therefore, 
it  is  better  to  store  at  surface,  if  the  character  of 
the  ore  will  permit  of  it,  lower-grade  ores  than  to 
bury  them  in  the  stopes  as  filling,  under  the  cer- 
tainty that  the  day  is  not  distant  when  they  will 
be  valuable;  or  if  they  must  be  left  underground, 
separate  the  ore,  no  matter  how  low,  from  actual 
waste.  It  may  cost  a  trifle  more  at  first  to  do 
so,  but  in  the  end  it  will  pay,  and  the  end  must 
always  be  kept  in  view.  I  have  to  do  with  a 
mine  which,  when  first  worked,  was  125  miles 
from  a  railroad,  and  the  standard  of  the  ore  fed 
to  the  furnace  was  fixed  by  the  management  at 
18  per  cent  of  copper.  With  lower  freight  and 
cheaper  fuel  the  standard  was  reduced  to  12  per 
cent.  Now  we  are  satisfied  to  feed  our  furnaces 
with  ore  of  between  6  and  7  per  cent.  During 
the  first  stage  12  per  cent  was  waste;  during  the 
second  7  per  cent  was  waste.  To-day  it  would  be 
rash  to  count  any  copper-bearing  material  as 
actual  waste;  but  at  each  stage  of  development 
the  ore  rejected  for  the  moment  was  treated  as 
worthless  and  thrown  away  as  stope  filling,  and 
is  recovered,  though  at  needless  cost.  As,  how- 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      81 

ever,  the  property  has  thrice  changed  hands 
since  the  early  days,  the  original  owners  would 
have  derided  the  suggestion  that,  for  the  good  of 
their  successors,  they  should  have  incurred  a  dol- 
lar of  unnecessary  expense.  In  very  truth,  how- 
ever, the  property  would  not  so  often  have  changed 
hands  had  the  future  and  not  the  immediate  pres- 
ent been  more  prominent  in  the  calculations  of 
each  successive  administration. 

The  ores  of  the  Arizona  mines  have  changed 
and  so  have  the  methods  of  treatment.  For 
years  it  was  considered  that  with  the  appearance 
of  sulphur  would  date  the  rapid  decline  of  the 
mines.  Then  that  valuable  element  was  regarded 
as  pernicious  and  worse  than  waste.  To-day  it  is 
in  urgent  demand;  for  with  the  introduction  of 
the  pneumatic  method,  and  the  cleaner  slags 
made  by  matte  smelting,  it  is  found  cheaper  to 
make  copper  from  a  sulphide  mixture,  though  by 
several  operations,  than  from  carbonate  ores  by 
a  single  furnace  treatment.  Moreover,  we  are 
everywhere  resmelting  the  rich  slags  formerly 
made,  where  they  were  preserved.  Unfortunately, 
at  certain  furnaces  they  were  considered  as  of 
such  little  prospective  value  as  to  have  been 


82       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

granulated  and  run  into  the  river  or  so  dumped 
that  they  have  been  washed  away.  We  are  not 
to  blame  for  having  made  copper  direct  from 
carbonate  ores,  though  it  involved  waste,  for 
sulphuretted  ores  were  not  obtainable  nor  would 
it  have  paid  to  reduce  a  sulphide  charge  by  the 
older  methods  in  vogue  twenty  years  ago.  But 
we  were  at  times  to  blame  for  not  anticipating, 
and  believing  that  metallurgy  and  railroading 
and  all  associated  industries  would  rapidly  ad- 
vance, and  put  cheaper  methods,  cheaper  fuel, 
cheaper  transportation  within  our  reach,  and 
thus  ennoble  what  was  then  waste  into  valuable 
material. 

The  same  has  been  eminently  true  of  the  waste 
from  gold,  silver  and  copper  concentrating-mills. 
Only  some  60  per  cent  of  the  hundreds  of  mil- 
lions which  the  Comstock  lode  yielded  was  recov- 
ered at  the  time,  and  yet  at  first  those  enor- 
mously rich  tailings  were  not  even  collected — 
such  was  the  haste  of  the  miner  to  empty  that 
stupendous  deposit,  which  should  have  made 
Nevada  prosperous  for  generations  instead  of 
whirling  the  whole  country  into  a  mad  dance  of 
reckless  speculation.  And  at  Anaconda  there 


Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy      83 

are  said  to  be  tailings  by  the  millions  of  tons 
which  will  run  from  2  to  2£  per  cent  of  copper, 
made  when  a  large  production  rather  than  minute 
economies  was  the  order  of  the  day.  The  values 
locked  up  in  our  Arizona  slags,  in  the  Comstock 
slimes,  in  the  Anaconda  tailings,  all  represent  a 
large  waste  and  heavy  loss,  even  though  they 
may  be  in  part  recovered  by  subsequent  treat- 
ment. 

Who  or  what  is  responsible?  Primarily  the 
company  system  and  the  heavy  capitalization  of 
our  large  mines,  involving  a  large  output  at  any 
expense,  if  the  value  of  the  shares  is  to  be  raised 
or  their  price  maintained  at  the  financial  centers. 

Overcapitalization  generally  demands  overpro- 
duction, and  overproduction  almost  inevitably  in- 
volves waste  at  some  stage  of  the  metal's  prog- 
ress from  the  mine  to  the  consumer. 

The  company  system  and  the  company  man- 
agers may  be  greater  sinners  than  ourselves,  for 
they  set  the  pace,  and  we  must  maintain  it.  At 
the  same  time  the  management  at  the  eastern 
end  is  generally  composed  of  able  and  honest 
business  men,  whose  ignorance  of  technical  de- 
tails obliges  them  to  rely  upon  their  technical 


84       Wastes  in  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

advisers,  and  the  more  worthy  the  members  of 
the  technical  staff  are,  the  more  implicit  will  be 
the  confidence  imposed  in  them,  and,  therefore, 
their  influence.  On  us,  therefore,  ultimately  rests 
the  responsibility  in  great  measure  of  correcting 
the  evils  of  waste  to  which  I  have  drawn  your 
attention.  For,  depend  upon  it,  if  from  no  higher 
motive,  you  will  find  the  eastern  management 
willing  enough  to  spend  money  in  order  to  save 
money,  and  there  is  always  money  saved  in 
avoiding  waste.  But  apart  from  this  sordid  view 
of  the  subject,  it  will  elevate  your  whole  concep- 
tion of  the  dignity  of  your  profession  and  your 
work,  if  you  regard  yourselves,  which  indeed  you 
should  be,  as  the  preservers  of  the  gifts  with 
which  a  beneficent  Providence  has  stored  our 
world,  for  next  to  being  a  creator,  the  highest 
function  a  man  can  attain  to  is  being  a  saver — a 
savior. 


Some  of  the  Relations  of  Railway  Transporta- 
tion in  the  United  States  to  Mining  and 
Metallurgy 

(An  Oration  delivered  before  the  Graduating  Class  under  the  Faculty  of 
Applied  Science,  at  Columbia  University,  June  1 2,  1906) 

WE  can  best  appreciate  the  part  the  railroad 
has  played  in  the  industrial  progress  made  by 
this  country  by  comparison  with  one  of  our 
industrial  rivals — England,  for  example.  The 
railroad,  as  a  factor  in  commercial  life,  came  into 
existence  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic  in  1829 
and  1830,  when  the  Liverpool  and  Manchester 
Railroad  ran  its  first  train,  when  the  "  Stourbridge 
Lion "  from  England  made  its  first  trip  on  the 
Delaware  &  Hudson  Co.  track  at  Honesdale.  In 
1830  Peter  Cooper's  "Tom  Thumb  "  moved  a  train 
out  of  Baltimore,  and  the  "  Best  Friend,"  built  at 
the  West  Point  Foundry,  was  run  on  the  South 
Carolina  R.  R.  These  few  miles  increased  to  95 
in  New  York,  New  Jersey,  Pennsylvania,  Vermont 
and  South  Caroliua  during  1831 . 

85 


86     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

But  mining  and  metallurgical  operations  were 
much  more  active  on  the  little  island  than  on  our 
big  continent.  When  the  railroad  arrived  to 
assist  in  reversing  the  industrial  status,  the 
insular  position  and  the  configuration  of  Great 
Britain  enabled  her  to  take  advantage  of  her 
mineral  resources;  while  our  population,  scat- 
tered even  then  over  almost  half  our  section  of 
the  continent,  with  few  canals  or  no  really  cheap 
means  of  intercourse  or  transportation,  could  not 
have  built  up  any  large  metallurgical  enterprise, 
no  matter  what  the  natural  resources  might  be. 

England's  production  of  pig  iron  was  then 
677,417  tons,  but  the  success  of  the  Liverpool 
and  Manchester  Railroad  created  a  railroad- 
building  mania  so  acute  that  before  1840,  299 
acts  authorizing  the  construction  of  3,000  miles 
of  railroad  had  been  passed  by,  or  were  before, 
Parliament;  but  the  3,000  miles  had  not  been 
actually  built.  The  stimulus  thus  given  to  the 
iron  trade  was,  however,  such  that  the  production 
of  iron  rose  in  1840  to  1,396,400  tons.  We  thus 
get  the  first  example  of  the  tremendous  reciprocal 
influence  which  railroads  have  exerted  upon 
the  iron  trade. 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  87 

Here,  once  started,  our  progress  in  railroad 
building  was  rapid,  for  by  1840  we  had  2,818 
miles  in  actual  operation,  or  more  than  England. 
But  in  1830,  when  neither  country  possessed 
facilities  for  inland  transportation,.  England  far 
surpassed  us  in  metal  production.  There  were, 
as  I  have  said,  produced  in  Great  Britain  678,417 
tons  of  pig  iron.  She  mined  about  50,000  tons 
of  coal,  made  11,500  tons  of  copper,  about  58,000 
tons  of  lead,  and  4,400  tons  of  tin.  Since  then 
her  railroad  mileage  has  increased  to  22,700, 
her  production  of  pig  iron  to  9,000,000  tons,  her 
lead  production,  however,  has  declined  to  20,000 
tons,  her  production  of  copper  has  become  a 
negligible  quantity,  and  her  tin  production 
has  not  increased.* 

Meanwhile  our  railroad  mileage  has  grown  to 
212,000,  our  pig  iron  production  from  135,940 
tons  to  22,822,380  tons;  our  coal  from  209,000  to 
314,562,880  tons;  our  copper  from  nothing  to 
462,000  tons,  and  our  lead  from  10,000  to  322,886 
tons. 

*In  1907  England's  production  of  pig  iron  was  10,100,000 
tons,  but  the  production  of  pig  iron  in  the  United  States  has 
risen  to  25,975,944  tons,  and  the  tonnage  of  coal  to  over 
600,000,000. 


88     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

That  England,  without  railroads,  should  have 
occupied  so  conspicuous  a  position  in  the  metal- 
lurgical world,  while  we,  with  a  population  at 
that  date  of  only  three  and  a  half  millions  less 
than  that  of  England,  Scotland,  and  Wales,  pro- 
duced so  much  less,  was  due  to  her  geographical 
configuration,  and  the  distribution  of  her  im- 
portant metallic  and  non-metallic  deposits. 
England,  Scotland  and  Wales  are  included  in  a 
long,  narrow  island,  which  is  so  deeply  indented 
by  the  estuaries  of  navigable  rivers  that  the 
average  width  from  navigable  water  on  the  west 
coast  to  navigable  water  on  the  east  coast  does 
not  exceed  250  miles.  And  if  we  except  the  lead 
of  Derbyshire,  all  of  Great  Britain's  mineral 
wealth,  including  coal,  lies  sufficiently  near  navi- 
gable water  to  have  rendered  her  in  early  days 
prosperous  without  the  aid  of  railroads.  The  coal 
fields  of  Durham  and  Northumberland  are  on  the 
seashore,  or  intersected  by  the  Tyne;  the  Clyde 
and  the  Firth  of  Forth  cut  into  the  Scottish  coal 
basin,  which  extends  across  the  narrow  neck  from 
the  Atlantic  Ocean  to  the  North  Sea;  and  the 
Welch  coal  field  lies  on  or  near  the  Bristol  Chan- 
nel. The  Cleveland  iron  ores  are  close  to  the 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  89 

east  coast,  and,  unlike  any  of  our  own  great  ore 
bodies,  except  those  of  Alabama  and  Tennessee, 
are  almost  in  contact  with  the  fuel  suitable  for 
their  reduction.  On  the  west  coast  are  the  rich 
and  pure  haematites  which  give  industrial  life  to 
Barrow-on-Furniss.  The  coal  measures  reach  the 
sea  near  by  at  Whithaven,  Cumberland.  The 
copper  and  tin  of  Devon  and  Cornwall  have  been 
mined  from  time  immemorial  on  a  narrow  penin- 
sula washed  by  the  Atlantic  and  the  English 
Channel.  England  would,  therefore,  owing  to 
her  insular  position  and  conformation,  have  re- 
tained her  metallurgical  prominence  without  the 
railroad.  Its  introduction  has  been  in  fact  one 
cause  of  her  relative  decline,  inasmuch  as  not 
being  as  essential  to  her  growth  as  to  that  of  her 
great  rivals,  railroad  traffic  has  not  been  de- 
veloped with  the  same  energy  as  in  this  country 
and  in  Germany. 

Turning  to  our  own  position,  as  metal  miners 
and  workers,  in  1830,  the  year  of  the  railroad's 
advent,  when  the  census  records  were  still  given 
by  value,  we  made  $4,757,403  worth  of  pig  iron, 
of  which  Pennsylvania  contributed  $1,643,702. 
Taking  Swank's  value  of  pig  at  $35,  the  total 


90    Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

production  of  pig  was  135,940  tons.  Our  copper 
industry  did  not  assume  appreciable  proportions 
till  years  afterwards — the  first  recorded  produc- 
tion being  150  tons  in  1840.  But  the  lead  mines 
of  Missouri,  which  had  been  one  of  the  tempting 
baits  to  induce  dupes  of  an  earlier  day  to  invest 
in  Thomas  Law's  Mississippi  Bubble,  were  in 
1830,  with  small  contributions  from  Wisconsin, 
producing  all  of  the  8,000  to  10,000  tons  which 
we  were  then  making.  These  regions  were  suffi- 
ciently near  navigable  waters  to  be  accessible.* 

If  we  advance  to  the  census  of  1840,  the  first  in 
which  quantities  are  recorded  instead  of  values, 
we  are  struck  by  the  fact  that  the  advent  of  the 
railroad  does  not  seem  to  have  stimulated  the 
manufacture  of  iron  here  as  acutely  as  it  did  in 
England.  The  production  of  135,940  tons  in- 
creased to  only  286,902  tons — an  increase  of 

*  According  to  Warden,  in  1810  the  furnaces,  forges  and 
bloomeries  in  the  United  States  amounted  to  530,  of  which 
the  State  of  New  York  furnished  69.  But  many  of  the 
important  seats  of  the  industry  of  that  day  have  dis- 
appeared. The  Franconia  Works  in  New  Hampshire,  estab- 
lished in  1810,  are  particularly  mentioned  as  employing  a 
capital  of  $100,000.  The  Vergennes  Works  in  Vermont 
promised  to  be  very  important.  He  tells  us  that  the  pi  ice 
of  bar  iron  at  that  establishment  was  $140  per  ton. 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  91 

150,963  tons,  while  in  England  it  rose  from  677,- 
417  to  1,396,400  tons.  Though  most  of  the  roads 
were  laid  with  strap  rails,  T  rails  were  already 
supplanting  them,  but  none  were  rolled  in  this 
country  till  1844. 

And  the  concentration  of  the  iron  industry, 
was  not  notable,  the  Alleghanies  not  having  yet 
been  surmounted  by  an  iron  road.  In  that  year 
the  286,903  tons  of  pig  iron  were  made  in  804 
blast  furnaces,  located  all  over  the  inhabited 
country  from  Maine  to  Michigan, — the  average 
production  per  furnace  per  day  being  only  2170 
pounds.  Of  these  213  were  in  Pennsylvania. 
There  were  almost  the  same  number  of  bloomeries, 
forges  and  rolling  mills,  making  only  197,233  tons 
of  bars — Pennsylvania  producing  but  87,244  tons. 
Minnesota,  which  now  stands  first  and  foremost 
as  an  iron  ore  producer,  was  still  a  part  of  that 
great  undefined  wilderness  known  as  the  North- 
west Territory,  but  Michigan  had  been  for  four 
years  admitted  to  the  privileges  of  statehood 
and  was  a  producer  of  iron,  and  finished  iron 
products,  using  charcoal  as  fuel.  The  South- 
ern States  made  iron  in  small  quantities  for 
local  uso,  but  New  York,  New  Jersey  and 


92     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

Pennsylvania    were     the     most     active     manu- 
facturers. 

Though  Pennsylvania  was  at  the  head  of  the 
list  of  iron  producers,  she  occupied  that  position 
by  virtue  of  her  possession  of  iron  deposits  within 
her  own  limits  of  such  size  and  richness  that  they 
still  sustain  centers  of  great  local  activity.  The 
Cornwall  ore  banks  maintain  the  credit  of  the 
famous  South  Mountain  Range,  and  hold  their 
own  as  one  of  the  great  iron  mines  of  the  country. 
Their  production  in  1903  was  401,469  tons, 
though,  with  the  iron  industry  generally,  they 
fell  off  in  1904.  There  were  in  Allegheny  County, 
where  Pittsburgh  is  now  situated,  in  1840,  28 
charcoal  furnaces,  producing  6,584  tons  of  pig 
iron  and  12  bloomeries  and  forges,  producing 
28,100  tons  of  bars.  The  large  amount  of  finished 
iron  was  due  to  the  fact  that  already  the  fine  coals 
of  that  district  attracted  pig  made  elsewhere  to 
Pittsburgh.  Pennsylvania  occupied  prominence 
by  virtue  of  her  home  supply  of  ore,  and  Pitts- 
burgh was  the  heart  of  Pennsylvania's  iron  trade 
by  reason  of  her  coal.  To-day  Pennsylvania's 
furnaces  make  half  the  iron  of  the  country,  but 
not  from  her  own  ores,  for  in  1905  her  furnaces 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  93 

poured  forth  10,599,107  tons  of  pig  iron,  but 
her  mines  produced  only  810,000  tons  of  ore. 

The  explanation  lies  in  the  potency  of  trans- 
portation. Pittsburgh  possesses  coal  and  coke, 
Michigan  and  Minnesota  the  largest,  purest,  and, 
considering  their  quality,  the  most  cheaply  mined 
ores  in  the  country.  It  is  at  present  cheaper 
to  bring  the  ore  to  the  fuel,  and  to  the  people 
who  buy  and  consume  the  iron,  than  to  take 
the  fuel  to  the  ore  and  carry  back  most  of  the 
finished  product.  And  the  complete  revolution 
effected  within  the  last  half  century  in  this  and 
every  other  great  branch  of  metallurgy  has  been 
brought  about  by  the  railroad  and  steamboat. 
Of  the  fifty  million  tons  of  ore  treated  in  this 
country  last  year,  34,353,456  came  from  Lake 
Superior,  and  by  far  the  largest  shipments  were 
from  the  Mesaba  Range,  1,025  miles  distant  from 
Pittsburgh,  where  the  ores  were  reduced. 

In  deciding  where  it  is  most  economical  to 
reduce  ore  to  metal,  the  cost  of  transporting  the 
raw  material,  the  fuel  and  the  finished  product 
to  the  most  profitable  market,  are  the  determin- 
ing factors. 

There  are  some  strange  contradictions  of  this 


94     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

rule,  as  for  instance,  the  persistency  with  which 
the  copper  and  brass  trade  adhere  to  the  Nau- 
gatuck  Valley  in  Connecticut.  It  has  been  an 
old  industry  there,  for  Warden  in  1819  says 
"Metal  button^  have  been  manufactured  at 
Watcrbury  and  New  Haven  of  which  the  annual 
amount  has  been  estimated  at  $100,000."  And 
there  are  ill-suited  locations  of  some  of  our  large 
iron  works,  which  were  started  originally  near 
some  small  iron  deposits  now  exhausted,  or  on 
a  water  power,  too  trifling  to  be  used  to-day, 
but  which  survive  as  geographical  anomalies 
because  the  necessity  is  not  yet  urgent  enough 
to  oblige  the  owners  to  wipe  out  the  large  capital 
invested.  But  our  more  progressive  corpora- 
tions are  taking  this  radical  step,  as  in- 
stanced by  the  Lackawanna  Steel  Co.,  whose 
owners  have  transferred  their  works  from 
Scranton  to  Buffalo,  while  their  name  alone 
perpetuates  their  former  prosperous  existence 
in  the  heart  of  Pennsylvania.  If  we  assume 
for  instance  that  at  present  two  tons  of  Lake 
Superior  make  one  ton  of  pig  iron,  and  that  one 
ton  of  fuel  is  consumed  in  reducing  them  to  one 
ton  of  pig,  and  this  pig  iron  is  used  up  in  the 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  95 

east,  then  two  tons  of  cheaply  handled  ore  are 
transferred  to  Pittsburgh,  whereas  if  that  ore 
were  reduced  at  the  mine,  one  ton  of  fuel,  whose 
transportation,  owing  to  its  bulk,  is  more  costly 
than  that  of  a  ton  of  ore,  would  have  to  be  car- 
ried from  Pennsylvania  or  Ohio,  and  one  ton  of 
pig  of  high  value,  and  therefore  commanding  a 
higher  freight  rate,  would  of  necessity  be  shipped 
back  to  the  eastern  market.  Under  either  con- 
dition four  tons  of  freight  must  be  shipped  to  lay 
down  a  ton  of  pig  in  Pittsburgh — two  tons  from 
west  to  east,  and  two  from  east  to  west,  but  the 
eastbound  ore  can  be  handled  with  less  loss  and 
at  less  cost  than  coal  and  coke  could  be  carried 
west  and  pig  iron  east.  Therefore,  up  to  the 
limit  of  the  demand  of  the  eastern  market  for 
pig  iron,  it  is  cheaper  to  make  it  of  Lake  Superior 
ore  in  Pittsburgh  than  to  make  it  on  Lake  Superior. 
But  the  western  market  is  rapidly  growing,  and 
new  works  are  being  laid  out  on  Lake  Michigan, 
rather  than  either  in  the  heart  of  Pennsylvania 
or  on  Lake  Erie,  for  both  Michigan  and  Minne- 
sota ore  can  be  laid  down  more  cheaply  on  the 
shores  of  Lake  Michigan  than  at  any  point  in 
Pennsylvania  or  Ohio;  and  though  the  great 


96    Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

central  coal  basin  does  not  yield  a  good  coking 
coal,  it  does  produce  cheap  fuel  for  converting 
pig  into  finished  product.  Last  year  the  ship- 
ments of  iron  ore  from  Lake  Superior  amounted 
to  34,353,456  tons.*  Of  this  84.4  per  cent  were 
transferred  inland  by  rail  to  ports  on  Lake  Erie; 
the  balance,  5,369,098,  was  shipped  to  points 
on  Lake  Michigan. 

As,  however,  the  west  grows— and  the  west  is 
shifting  always  to  points  still  further  west,  its 
demands  for  iron  grow  almost  more  rapidly  than 
the  east,  and  the  center  of  manufacturing  will 
continue  to  move  westward.  This  tendency  we 
see  in  the  rapid  expansion  of  the  only  large  iron 
and  steel  organization  west  of  the  Missouri — 
the  Colorado  Fuel  and  Iron  Co.  While  in  1900 
its  furnaces  at  Pueblo  made  only  150,204  tons 
of  pig  iron,  they  made  in  1905,  407,774  tons. 
And  yet  these  furnaces  depend  on  long  distance 
freight  for  their  supply  of  ore.  Some  of  it  comes 
over  a  haul  of  700  miles  from  southern  New 
Mexico;  and  much  of  it  comes  from  Wyoming, 


*  In  1907  the  shipments  from  Lake  Superior  amounted  to 
about  42,000,000  tons. 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  97 

and  distant  points  in  Colorado.  But  the  fuel 
supply  is  near  at  hand  in  the  Trinidad  coal  field. 
We  know  of  no  iron  deposits  in  the  west  com- 
parable in  size  to  those  on  Lake  Superior,  but 
there  are  many  which  can  be  profitably  worked. 
And  though  within  our  own  territory  west  of  the 
Great  Salt  Lake  Basin,  we  have  no  good  coking 
coal,  our  neighbors  to  the  north  can  supply  it, 
or  we  can  draw  it  from  New  South  Wales,  which 
already  has  shipped  coal  for  railroad  purposes  to 
the  Pacific  Coast.  From  our  other  neighbor  on  the 
south,  should  iron  and  steel  works  be  started  on 
the  west  coast,  we  can  draw  ore  from  the  large 
deposits  said  to  lie  on  the  very  seashore  near 
Acapulco;  for  distance  is  being  rapidly  oblit- 
erated by  steam,  and  by  it  also  let  us  hope  inter- 
national selfishness  and  commercial  exclusiveness. 
Literature  is  tending  to  unify  the  race,  and  com- 
merce, through  the  railroad  and  steamboat,  is 
another  beneficent  force  working  to  the  same  end. 
As  people  come  to  know  one  another  better,  they 
will  surely  imitate  and  adopt,  under  a  process 
of  natural  selection,  each  other's  better  qualities, 
and  without  losing  their  national  idiosyncrasies, 
acquire  a  higher  cosmopolitan  character. 


98     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

The  marvellous  feats  which  two  geneartions  of 
engineers,  in  handling  steam  and  electricity,  have 
enabled  us  to  perform,  may  not  be  duplicated  by 
equal  progress  during  the  next  half  century. 
Yet  it  goes  without  saying  that  but  for  our  trans- 
portation facilities  we  would  not  occupy  in  the 
world's  race  the  same  advanced  position  we  have 
acquired  to-day,  for  the  very  vastness  of  our 
country,  and  the  actual  distance  of  our  national 
resources  from  one  another  and  from  the  popu- 
lation which  consumes  them,  would  have  ren- 
dered many  of  them  valueless.  But,  given  control 
of  steam,  the  great  size  of  our  mineral  deposits 
and  the  long  distances  over  our  continental  areas 
that  we  must  transport  material,  has  inspired 
our  transportation  engineers  to  work  on  a  larger 
scale  than  their  fellow  craftsmen  across  the  sea. 
We  handle  longer  trains,  with  larger  cars,  and  as 
a  rule  at  a  much  lower  rate  of  freight  than  they 
do.  Otherwise,  neither  our  miner  nor  our  metal- 
lurgist could  perform  the  duty  required  of  them. 

Take  for  instance  the  cost  of  transporting  a 
ton  of  iron  ore  from  Lake  Superior  to  Pittsburgh— 
70  cents  from  the  mines  to  Duluth,  a  distance 
of  80  miles;  75  cents  for  1000  miles  by  steamer 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  99 

to  Cleveland  (though  the  rate  has  been  as  low  as 
57  cents,  and  though,  when  the  first  shipments 
were  made  from  Michigan  in  1856,  the  rate  was 
$3.00);  then  $1.18  from  Lake  Erie  points  to 
Pittsburgh,  a  distance  of  135  miles — making  the 
total  transportation  $2.63  for  1250  miles,  in- 
cluding transfers. 

Soft  coal  is  carried  by  eastern  roads  at  about  a 
half  cent  per  ton  a  mile,  but  the  rate  on  some 
western  roads  is  as  low  as  four  mills  a  ton  per  mile. 

Nor  is  it  only  in  the  iron  trade  that  low  rates 
of  carriage  have  helped  the  metallurgist.  Copper 
is  transported  at  $10  a  ton  from  Montana  to  the 
Atlantic,  a  distance  of  nearly  3000  miles.  And 
the  necessity  of  low  fuel  costs  to  the  metallurgy 
of  copper  is  obvious,  seeing  that  when  treating 
ores  of  copper,  whose  percentage  of  valuable  metal 
is  so  low  that,  even  including  those  submitted  to 
preliminary  water  concentration,  as  many  as  twenty 
tons  are  probably  smelted  on  an  average  to  yield 
one  ton  of  copper.  In  such  cases  the  fuel  must  be 
carried  to  the  ore — not  the  ore  to  the  fuel,  as  when 
smelting  rich  iron  ores.  At  the  Copper  Queen  Works 
in  the  early  days  the  cheapest  coke  was  Cardiff 
Patent  Pressed  brought  round  the  Horn  in  wheat 


loo     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

ships  to  San  Francisco.  It  cost  more  than  three 
times  the  price  at  which  New  Mexico  or  Colorado 
coke  is  now  delivered,  after  a  railroad  haul  of 
from  800  to  1000  miles.  Coal  for  steam  genera- 
tion was  then  so  costly  that  the  country  was 
swept  clear  of  its  scanty  accessible  forests.  For 
raising  steam  crude  oil  is  now  brought  in  from 
Texas  and  California  at  a  frieght  rate  not  ex- 
ceeding three-fourths  cent  per  ton  mile,  so  that 
at  one  smelting  works  in  southern  Arizona,  700 
miles  away  from  the  nearest  coal  or  available 
petroleum  wells,  power  is  generated  at  a  cost  for 
fuel,  maintenance  and  all  expenses,  of  $79  per  ton 
per  year.  Montana  draws  its  coke  largely  from 
Pennsylvania,  or  from  coke  ovens  on  Lake  Superior, 
fed  with  Pennsylvania  coal,  the  fuel  travelling 
over  2000  miles  from  the  pits  to  the  furnaces. 
While  complaint  may  be  made  against  some 
railroads  for  charging  exorbitant  rates  on  coal, 
our  western  roads  are  certainly  not  culpable,  or 
Montana  would  not  be  able  to  turn  out  in  metallic 
copper  about  one-fifth  of  the  world's  total,  and 
Arizona  about  one-seventh  of  the  world's  total,* 

*  In  1907  the  order  of  precedence  was  reversed,  Arizona 
having  made  116,230  tons  of  copper  and  Montana  101,635 
tons. 


Mining  and  Machinery  101 

bhough  both  are  situated  in  the  heart  of  a  con- 
tinent, and  between  2000  'and  3000  miles  distant 
from  the  point  where  their  crude  product  is 
refined  and  marketed. 

The  interdependence  of  mines  on  railroads  and 
of  railroads  on  mines  is  best  appreciated  by  some 
familiar  examples  of  what  each  does.  Butte, 
both  the  town  and  the  great  Butte  Mines,  are 
situated  on  a  mountain  side  facing  a  valley  be- 
neath whose  surface  water  can  be  reached  in  any 
quantity  and  at  all  seasons  only  by  wells,  but 
where  none  flows.  The  two  great  corporations 
operating  there  have  been  obliged,  therefore, 
in  order  to  concentrate  mechanically  their  large 
tonnage  of  low  grade  ore,  to  transport  their  ores 
to  water.  A  site  26  miles  distant  on  the  Deer 
Lodge  River  was  selected  by  the  Anaconda  Co., 
and  thither  to  their  new  Washoe  Works  are 
carried  daily  from  Butte,  of  their  own  and 
custom  ore,  about  9000  tons  at  a  cost  of  about 
$5.00  per  car,  or  14  cents  per  ton.  As  the  ore 
contains  less  than  three  per  cent  of  copper  per 
ton  and  $1.29  in  gold  and  silver,  a  haul  of  that 
length  would  be  profitable  only  if  carried  at  such 
low  rates  of  freight.  The  other  large  company, 


1O2     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

the  Boston  and  Montana  Co.,  sends  its  ores  170 
miles  to  Great  Falls,  where,  however,  the  com- 
pany has  the  advantage  of  water  power. 

The  mining,  transportation  and  smelting  opera- 
tions of  our  large  corporations  are  on  a  stu- 
pendous scale,  but  the  transportation  is  as  essen- 
tial an  item  in  the  result  as  the  mining  and  smelt- 
ing. For  the  United  States  Steel  Corporation 
there  were  handled  last  year  18,486,556  tons  of 
Lake  Superior  ore,  and  they  themselves  manu- 
facture 12,242,909  tons  of  coke,  which  must  have 
used  up  20,000,000  tons  of  coal.  This  coal  pro- 
duction is  exclusive  of  2,204,950  tons  mined  by 
themselves  alone.  For  flux  they  use  4,000,000 
tons  of  limestone.  About  38,000,000  tons  of 
freight,  therefore,  as  ore,  fuel  and  flux,  must 
have  been  transported,  half  of  it  for  over  an 
average  of  1,000  miles,  in  addition  to  10,000,000 
tons  of  finished  product  for  a  shorter  distance. 
A  total  of  about  48,000,000  tons  of  freight  were 
contributed  by  this  single  corporation.  As  it 
made  only  9,940,799  tons,  out  of  22,992,380  tons 
of  pig  iron  made  in  this  country,  or  43  per  cent 
of  the  whole,  the  total  tonnage  moved  for  a 
longer  or  shorter  distance  by  the  iron  smelting 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  103 

industry    must    have    been    approximately    one 
hundred  and  nine  million  tons. 

An  interesting  instance  of  the  facilities  which 
transportation  gives  the  metallurgist  is  afforded 
by  the  shipment  of  copper  matte  from  Tennessee 
to  the  heart  of  Mexico,  where  it  has  been  used 
to  collect  gold  and  silver  from  dry  ores  in  the 
furnace  and  converter,  and  then  returned  for 
electrolytic  refining  and  separation  to  the  United 
States.  Copper  bars  come  from  New  Zealand  to 
be  refined  here,  and  the  refined  product  is  returned 
to  Europe  for  consumption,  for  we  ship  abroad 
about  40  per  cent  of  our  production.  Without 
cheap  carriage,  often  for  long  distances,  of  ore 
necessary  to  make  a  profitable  mixture  in  lead 
and  copper  furnaces,  many  a  district  would  be 
unexplored  and  unexploited.  Till  recently,  for 
instance,  the  mines  at  Globe,  Arizona,  languished 
for  want  of  sulphur  and  iron  flux,  and  could 
barely  make  a  million  Ibs.  of  copper  a  month. 
But  the  railroads,  appreciating  the  needs  of  the 
miner,  and  appreciating  what  is  their  own  true 
interest,  published  a  low  ore  tariff  which  en- 
abled pyrites  to  be  imported  from  distant  districts 
where  it  is  in  excess;  and  as  a  result  the  pro- 


104     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

duction  rapidly  rose  to  three  million  pounds  a 
month. 

The  copper  industry,  as  compared  with  the 
iron  trade,  if  gauged  by  the  quantity  of  copper 
produced,  is  insignificant;  but  if  measured  by 
the  ore  raised  in  making  a  ton  of  copper,  it  as- 
sumed very  different  proportions.  Instead  of 
two  tons  of  ore  to  the  ton  of  metal,  as  in  the  case 
of  iron,  the  average  of  ore  mined,  previous  to 
water  concentration,  is  more  nearly  forty  tons, 
and  therefore  there  are  handled,  to  make  our 
460,000  tons  of  copper,  about  18,000,000  tons  of 
ore.  Though  this  is  not  carried  the  same  dis- 
tance that  iron  ore  is  carried  to  fuel,  nearly  all 
of  it  is  moved  by  steam  for  a  longer  or  shorter 
distance;  and  as  about  four  tons  of  fuel  are  con- 
sumed to  make  one  ton  of  copper,  nearly  twenty 
million  tons  of  freight  must  be  carried  by  the 
railroads  to  enable  us  to  maintain  our  position 
in  the  copper  world. 

Without  going  into  the  economies  of  railroad 
rates,  I  would  remind  you  that  the  low  rates,  at 
which  are  carried  these  large  quantities  of  low  grade 
freight,  on  which  the  very  existence  of  our  large 
metallurgical  industries  depend,  are  economically 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  105 

possible  only  if  supplemented  by  higher  rates  on 
higher  class  freight.  And  the  very  remunerative 
wages  given  miners  and  mill  workers,  and  the 
high  standard  of  their  living,  gives  the  railroad 
a  large  proportion  of  such  profitable  traffic.  For 
instance,  on  a  railroad  with  which  I  am  connected, 
and  which  depends  almost  exclusively  for  its 
traffic  on  mines,  the  proportion  of  the  different 
classes  of  freight  is  approximately  as  follows: 

Ore,  49  per  cent 

Coke,  16 


Coal  and  Petroleum,  3 

Lumber,  8 

Copper  bullion,  7 

Merchandise,  fodder,  etc.,  17 


83  per  cent  of  traffic 
is  carried  at  a  very 
low  rate. 

at  a  higher  rate. 


The  Interstate  Commerce  Statistics  of  Railroads 
for  1906  gives  a  summary  showing  traffic  move- 
ment and  the  large  proportion  of  mineral  freight 
carried  (see  table  on  page  106). 

Our  western  copper  industry,  like  our  iron 
industry,  sprang  into  life  on  the  touch  of  the 
railroad.  Not  until  the  Southern  Pacific  ap- 
proached Arizona  in  1880  was  any  notable  copper 
made  there,  and  the  railroad  alone  galvanized 
Butte  within  a  year  afterwards  into  activity. 
And  to-day  our  increasing  production  of  that 
much  sought-after  metal  is  due  either  to  rail- 


106     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 


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Mining  and  Metallurgy  107 

road  extension  into  new  regions  or  to  lower  freight 
rates  over  existing  railroads.  For  our  railroads 
have  been  learning  that  their  prosperity  depends 
on  the  healthy  growth  of  the  industries  along 
their  lines,  and  that  these  industries  can  be 
starved  to  death  by  high  freight  rates  or  fed 
into  lusty  vigor  by  encouragement.  I  venture 
to  think  that  none  of  us — miner  or  metallurgist 
— will  often  be  driven  to  take  advantage  of  any  of 
the  useful  but  drasticclauses  of  the  Rate  Bill  which 
both  Houses  are  so  busy  framing  for  our  benefit. 
If  we  have  a  grievance,  it  will  be  easier  to  make 
the  railroad  traffic  manager,  with  his  knowledge  of 
local  conditions,  understand  it  and  induce  him  to 
apply  the  remedy  than  to  explain  the  intricacies  of 
our  case  and  depend  for  relief  on  a  Commission  in 
Washington.  The  railroads  may  not  have  been 
always  in  the  past  as  far  sighted  as  their  customers, 
and  their  officials  have  not  always  strictly  obeyed 
the  laws.  But  inasmuch  as  some  of  the  most 
energetic,  as  well  as  the  most  able,  men  in  the 
country  now  control  them,  if  the  public  will  not 
give  them  credit  for  common  honesty  or  patriotism, 
it  cannot  deny  them  the  vice  or  virtue  of  self- 
interest  (call  it  selfishness  if  you  will)  and  this, 


io8     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

not  favoritism  nor  legislative  compulsion,  in- 
duces them  to  foster  the  great  industries  de- 
pendent on  their  road.  Moreover,  and  the  rule 
has  proved  to  be  almost  of  universal  application, 
that  the  small  shipper  benefits  by  the  advantages 
secured  by  his  big  wholesale  neighbor,  and  enjoys 
rates  which  otherwise  his  own  scanty  traffic 
would  not  permit  the  railroad  to  give  him;  for 
low  freights  are  dependent  on  large  quantities 
carried,  and  the  enormous  bulk  of  our  business 
is  one  of  the  principal  reasons  why  our  railroads 
can  furnish  such  cheap  transportation.  It  would 
be  foreign  to  my  purpose  and  improper  in  this 
place  to  discuss  the  accusations  brought  against 
the  railroads,  or  rather  against  their  officers,  of 
fraud  and  favoritism;  but  it  is  not  improper  to 
direct  attention  to  the  extraordinary  courage, 
energy  and  skill,  as  well  as  amount  of  capital 
which  have  been  put  into  the  building  up  of  our 
stupendous  railroad  system,  and  to  its  vital 
influence  on  all  our  great  industries,  which  have, 
as  a  general  rule,  developed  with  the  same  rapidity 
as  the  railroads  on  which  they  depend.  Any 
check,  therefore,  given  to  legitimate  expansion 
of  our  railroads  by  ill-advised  legislation,  and 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  109 

by  creating  disturbance  of  public  confidence,  must 
react  sensitively,  not  only  on  railroad  securities, 
which  is  a  small  matter,  but  on  our  farming,  our 
mining  and  all  the  other  branches  of  national  indus- 
try which  depend  on  railroad  transportation,  and 
on  whose  prosperity  conversely  railroads  depend. 

And  it  is  rather  remarkable  that,  considering 
the  scrutiny  to  which  railroads  are  subjected, 
the  intense  competition  in  seeking  business,  not 
only  between  the  railroads  as  corporations,  but 
as  between  the  subordinate  officers  and  depart- 
ments of  each  road,  that  so  few  suits  have  been 
brought  and  so  few  convictions  obtained  for 
breach  of  the  existing  laws.  There  are  1,400,000 
railroad  employes,  all,  as  a  rule,  eager  to  advance 
their  interests  by  furthering  the  prosperity  of  the 
corporation  which  they  serve,  and  the  corpora- 
tion is  responsible  for  any  improper  means  that 
any  of  them  may  employ  to  attain  that  end. 

There  remains  a  product  of  the  miner's  skill 
upon  which,  above  all  others,  the  commercial 
and  political  welfare  of  the  country  depends.  I 
refer,  of  course,  to  coal.  Fortunately,  nature 
has  not  only  been  lavish  of  this  gift,  but  has 
scattered  it  so  widely  that  every  great  section 


lio     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

has  received  its  share.  Moreover,  in  most  local- 
ities, the  coal  beds  are  so  accessible  and  are 
deposited  so  horizontally  that  it  can  be  mined 
much  more  cheaply  than  in  any  of  the  active 
industrial  centers  of  Europe.  The  effect  of  this 
cheap  fuel  on  our  mining  and  metallurgical 
industries  has  been  already  referred  to  as  one 
reason  for  the  concentration  of  our  most  impor- 
tant industry — that  of  iron  and  steel  making — at 
localities  where  fuel  is  exceptionally  cheap.  But 
there  are  other  and  more  important  phases  of  this 
subject  which  have  a  profound  national  bearing. 

Of   the   249,612,420   tons   of   bituminous   coal 
mined  in  1904 — 

Tons. 

142,681,714,  or  57  per  cent,  came  from  Middle  States:  Mary- 
land, Ohio,  Pennsylvania  West 
Virginia. 

70,703,161,  or  28  "  came  from  Western  States:  Colo- 
rado, Illinois,  Indiana,  Iowa, 
Kansas,  Michigan,  Missouri, 
Montana,  Nebraska,  North  Da- 
kota, Wyoming. 

4,308,312  or  2  "  came  from  Pacific  States:  Cali- 
fornia, Idaho,  Oregon,  Utah, 
Washington. 

31,486,852,  or  13  "  came  from  Southern  States:  Ala- 
bama, Arkansas,  Georgia,  In- 
dian Territory,  Kentucky,  New 
Mexico,  North  Carolina,  Ten- 
nessee, Texas,  Virginia. 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  1 1 1 

Now,  if  we  distribute  the  density  of  railroad 
traffic,  measured  by  the  tons  of  freight  carried 
one  mile,  over  the  same  section,  we  find  that 
density  to  be — 

Tons  of  Freight  Carried  one  Mile 

86,909,756,058      in  Middle  States,      or  50  per  cent  of  total. 
51,270,332,531      in  Western  States,    or  29 
8,002,279,490      in  Pacific  States, 
where  petro- 
leum is  largely 

used,  or    5         "  " 

27,231,621,498      in  Southern  States,  or  16         "  " 


174,522,089,577  100  per  cent. 

Such  parallelisms  cannot  be  accidental,  and  while 
it  shows  how  necessary  coal  is  to  the  life  of 
the  nation,  and  how  necessary,  therefore,  it  is 
that  no  unnecessary  barriers  be  erected  against 
its  free  distribution,  it  at  the  same  time  proves 
that  coal  mining  and  railroading  are  such  allied 
industries  that  they  cannot  very  well  be  divorced. 
The  relation  of  coal  mined  to  density  of  traffic 
in  1906  agrees  so  closely,  as  shown  by  the  follow- 
ing figures,  with  the  relation  existing  in  1904 
(when  the  lecture  was  delivered) ,  that  the  argu- 
ment is  irresistible  that  the  coal  production  and 
the  coal  transportation  facilities  of  the  country  at 
large  are  meeting  under  some  economic  law,  not 


1 1 2     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

by  accident,  the  industrial  requirements  of  the 
country. 

Of  the  306,136,274  tons  of  bituminous  coal 
mined  in  1906 — 

Tons. 

183,705,937,  or  60  per  cent,  came  from  Middle  States:  Mary- 
land, Ohio,  Pennsylvania,  West 
Virginia. 

80,668,599,  or  26  per  cent,  came  from  Western  States:  Colo- 
rado, Illinois,  Indiana,  Iowa, 
Kansas,  Michigan,  Missouri, 
Montana,  Nebraska,  North 
Dakota,  Wyoming. 

4,612,019,  or  2  "  came  from  Pacific  States:  Cali- 
fornia, Idaho,  Oregon,  Utah, 
Washington. 

37,151,719,  or  12  "  came  from  Southern  States:  Ala- 
bama, Arkansas,  Georgia,North 
Carolina,  Kentucky,  New  Mex- 
ico, Indian  Ter.,  Tennessee, 
Texas,  Virginia. 

If  we  again  distribute  the  density  of  railroad 
traffic  in  1906,  measured  by  the  tons  of  freight 
carried  one  mile,  over  the  same  sections,  we  find 
that  density  varies  very  slightly  in  proportion 
from  what  it  was  in  1904. 

Tona  of  Freight  Carried  one  Mile 

107.488,614,742  in  Middle  States,      or  50  per  cent. 

64,574,629,694  in  Western  States    or  30         " 

10,150,860,535  in  Pacific  States       or      5         " 

33,663,446,270  in  Southern  States,  or  15         " 


215,877,551,241  100  per  cent. 


Mining  and  Metallurgy 
COMPARATIVE  TABLE. 


1904, 
Coal 
Mined. 

1904, 
Density 
of  Traffic. 

1906, 
Coal 
Mined. 

ifioe. 

Density 
of  Traffic. 

Middle  States  

57% 

3097 

60% 

50% 

Western  States  
Pacific  States 

28%    . 
2% 

5% 

26% 

30% 

5% 

Southern  States 

13% 

16% 

12<7 

15% 

/o 

100% 

100% 

100% 

100% 

Therefore,  if  the  ratio  of  coal  produced  in  each 
great  section  of  our  land  bears  so  intimate  a 
relation  to  the  total  traffic  of  that  section,  any 
disturbance  of  traffic  by  the  imposition  of  rates 
which  would  hamper  manufacturing  industries, 
would  immediately  tell  upon  the  consumption 
and  therefore  the  production  of  coal,  and  vice 
versa  any  great  rise  in  the  price  of  coal  through 
depressing  manufacturing,  would  tell  at  once 
on  the  traffic.  As,  however,  both  traffic  and  coal 
mining  not  only  maintain  the  ratio,  but  both  in- 
crease rapidly  in  quantity,  the  inference  is  that 
railroads,  in  the  matter  of  rates  and  general 
facilities  for  transportation,  keep  pace  with  the 
demands  of  the  coal  miner  and  the  requirements 
of  the  manufacturing  public,  on  whose  activities 
the  density  of  traffic  depends.  If  the  railroad 


1 14     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

should  transgress,  as  they  are  generally  supposed 
to  do,  punishment  in  loss  of  general  traffic  would 
as  soon  overtake  them  as  punishment  at  the 
hands  of  the  Interstate  Commerce  Commission. 

But  cheap  fuel  and  cheap  transportation  have 
destroyed  industrial  sectionalism. 

Each  great  group  of  states,  as  we  have  seen, 
produces  independently  its  coal  requirements 
and  its  railroads,  and  industries  generally  are  sup- 
plied from  its  own  mines.  The  Pacific  coast  and 
the  Southeastern  Atlantic  coast,  are  most  scantly 
endowed  with  coal,  but  on  the  other  hand  have 
abundant  petroleum  resources,  though  for  metal- 
lurgical purposes,  the  western  states  sometimes 
draw  coke  from  other  regions.  Were  it  not  for 
this  comparatively  uniform  distribution  of  fuel, 
railroad  transportation  would  of  necessity  be 
higher,  and  all  interests,  especially  metallurgical 
and  manufacturing,  would  suffer.  As  it  is,  the 
old  economical  divisions  into  manufacturing  New 
England  and  northern  seaboard  states,  into  the 
southern  cotton  growing  states,  and  the  western 
wheat  raising  states,  have  disappeared,  and  with 
this  disappearance  has  vanished  that  diversity 
of  interest,  involving  political  dissension,  which 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  115 

was  so  marked  and  dangerous  a  feature  of  national 
life  before  the  War  of  Secession.  The  coal  of  the 
southern  states  has  facilitated  the  introduction 
of  cotton  spinning  and  of  other  manufactures 
which  give  diversity  and  a  higher  grade  of 
employment  to  the  negro  population  than  hoeing 
corn  and  picking  cotton.  Every  western  state, 
even  those  west  of  the  Missouri,  is  becoming  a  hive 
of  industrial  manufacturing  life,  owing  to  cheap 
coal.  New  England  alone,  largely  due  to  her 
distance  from  coal,  is  making  less  comparative 
progress  along  these  lines  than  other  sections,  as 
she  is  shut  off  by  tariff  partition  from  her  nearest 
and  natural  coal  supply,  that  of  the  maritime 
provinces  of  Canada. 

Thus  has  this  great  coal  industry,  to  whose  de- 
velopment transportation  is  as  much  an  element 
as  mining,  becomes  a  prominent  factor  in  our 
national  life. 

The  action  of  a  few  railroad  officials  and  coal 
mine  owners,  or  the  policy  of  some  coal  roads, 
may  require  that  further  safeguards  be  erected 
for  the  protection  of  the  public,  inasmuch  as 
the  above  consideration  and  figures  conclusively 
demonstrate  that  of  all  the  vast  interests  of  the 


1 16     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

country,  the  mining  and  the  distribution  of  its 
coal  is  the  most  vital  to  individual  and  national 
well-being.  But  on  the  other  hand,  any  reckless 
interference  with  fhe  machinery  by  which  such 
beneficent  results  have  been  brought  about,  and 
are  now  being  conferred  on  the  public,  may 
bring  about  disturbance  to  trade  which  it  may 
be  more  difficult  to  remedy  than  it  was  to  create. 
The  embarrassment  arising  from  a  plethora  of 
business  is  often  as  great  as  that  which  arises 
from  its  paucity,  and  this  presents  another  phase 
of  the  coal  situation  which  may  explain  some  of 
the  irritation  against  the  coal  roads.  A  rail- 
road's equipment  is  approximately  adjusted  to 
the  volume  of  its  traffic,  but  when,  as  sometimes . 
happens,  our  industries  grow  with  abnormal 
rapidity,  the  demands  on  the  railroads  outstrip 
not  only  their  material  resources,  but  the  human 
endurance  and  human  skill  of  their  employes. 
To  take  as  a  single  instance,  the  coal  cars  neces- 
sary to  handle  the  coal  output  of  1901,  which 
was  261,874,830  tons,  were  probably  sufficiently 
in  excess  of  actual  requiremnets  to  handle  that  of 
1902,  which  increased  to  only  269,117,177  tons; 
but  when  our  coal  production  jumped  in  1903 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  i  1 7 

to  319,069,229  tons,  there  was  inevitably  a 
car  shortage.*  In  1904  there  was  a  slight  falling 
off  in  production,  but  when  in  1905  it  reached 
suddenly  the  extraordinary  output  of  over  373,- 
000,000  tons,  all  mines  but  those  which  owned 
their  cars  must  have  suffered  at  the  hands  of  the 
underequipped  railroads.  And  at  such  a  crisis 
relief  cannot  be  readily  obtained,  as  the  car 
manufacturers  have  orders  booked  a  year  and 
more  ahead.  These  conditions,  which  are  peculiar 
to  the  commercial  vicissitudes  of  this  country, 
generally,  and  fortunately,  in  the  direction  of 
increased  prosperity,  throw  a  strain  on  the  rail- 
roads which  the  public  at  large  can  hardly  be 
expected  to  appreciate. 

There  is  one  more  subject  bearing  on  the  re- 
lation of  mining  and  railroads  to  which  I  wish 

*  On  October  2,  1907,  there  was  a  shortage  of  "coal  gon- 
dola and  hopper"  cars  throughout  all  of  the  railroads  in 
the  United  States  of  139,291.  This  shortage  was  most 
acute  in  the  States  of  Pennsylvania,  New  York,  New  Jersey, 
Ohio,  Indiana,  Illinois,  and  the  Birmingham  District. 

During  the  month  of  October  the  transportation  business 
reached  its  highest  mark,  and  from  that  time  up  to  the 
1st  of  Feb.,  1908,  there  was  a  steady  falling  off  in  traffic. 
As  a  result,  instead  of  a  shortage  of  over  139,000  "coal 
gondola  and  hopper"  cars,  there  was  on  February  1st  an 
actual  surplus  of  this  class  of  equipment  throughout  the 
United  States  amounting  to  156,634  cars. 


1 18     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

to  draw  your  attention,  and  that  is  also  statis- 
tical. The  intimate  relation  of  the  railroads  to 
our  great  mineral  and  metallurgical  industries — 
iron  and  steel — is  illustrated  by  the  parallelism 
between  the  extension  of  the  railroad  and  the 
increased  production  of  the  metal.  In  1840 
there  were  4535  miles  of  railroad  in  operation 
and  there  were  made  256,100  tons  of  pig  iron. 
By  the  end  of  the  century  there  were  250,142 
miles  of  track,  including  double  and  single,  and 
the  production  of  our  200  blast  furnaces  was 
13,620,703  tons.  Fifty-three  as  a  multiplier  ap- 
proximately represents  the  increase  in  both 
branches  of  industry.  Since  then  the  mileage 
of  our  steam  roads  has  not  kept  pace  with  our 
iron  production,  but  if  to  the  steam  road  mileage 
of  to-day  be  added  about  30,000  miles  of  recently 
completed  urban  and  interurban  roads,  70  as  a 
multiplier,  instead  of  53,  represents  approxi- 
mately in  both  spheres  of  activity  the  still  more 
intense  energy  exerted  within  the  last  few  years. 
A  similar  parallelism  may  be  traced  between  all 
branches  of  metallurgical  industry.  During  the 
last  ten  years,  when  copper  has  been  used  so 
extensively  in  both  electricity  and  architecture 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  119 

in  association  with  iron,  one  ton  of  the  rarer 
metal  has  been  used  to  83  tons  of  the  more  abund- 
ant, and  this  proportion  has  varied  only  slightly 
from  year  to  year. 

If  we  recede  in  our  comparative  study  beyond 
ten  years,  we  find  that  the  quantity  of  iron  in 
proportion  to  copper  between  1886  and  1892  con- 
sumed in  this  country  was  much  greater,  viz.,  97 
tons  of  iron  instead  of  83,  to  one  ton  of  copper. 
The  increased  use  of  copper  in  architecture  and 
electricity  explains  its  relatively,  as  well  as  its 
absolutely,  greater  consumption.  But  whereas 
more  copper  per  ton  of  iron  is  now  used  than 
formerly,  less  lead  is  consumed,  copper  generally 
replacing  it  in  architecture.  Zinc  has  maintained 
to  iron  a  very  steady  ratio.  This  dependence  of 
every  metal  on  every  other,  of  all  on  coal,  and  of 
both  coal  and  the  metals  on  transportation  forms 
one  of  the  chains  of  relations  which  link  together 
the  elements  of  our  industrial  life  as  intimately 
as  nature  binds  in  dependence  and  interde- 
pendence all  matter  and  force,  not  omitting 
ourselves,  though  we  often  struggle  to  liberate 
ourselves  from  its  clutches.  In  fact,  in  watch- 
ing the  efforts  of  men  to  regulate  their  lives  by 


1 2O     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

legislation,  one  cannot  help  comparing  the  ease 
with  which,  without  interference,  a  large  city 
like  our  own  is  fed  and  clothed,  under  some 
natural  laws  of  supply  and  demand,  with  the 
great  difficulty  which  the  commissariat  of  the 
most  systematic  of  governments  finds  in  feeding 
and  clothing  an  army  of  half  a  million  men. 
And  one  wonders  whether  we  are  not  nowadays 
taking  a  great  deal  of  trouble  to  correct  by  violent 
interference  evils  which  would  cure  themselves. 

The  vast  scale  on  which  our  continent  is  built 
and  the  abundance  with  which  its  resources  are 
stored,  both  on  its  surface  and  below  ground, 
has  exerted  an  influence  over  the  national  char- 
acter by  stimulating  the  emotions  and  imagina- 
tion of  almost  every  section  of  the  people.  One 
effect  has  been  to  excite  such  faith  in  its  illimitable 
possibilities  that  both  our  manufacturers  and 
metallurgists  are  willing  to  provide  for  anticipated 
business  at  large  outlay  on  a  scale  from  which 
our  foreign  and  more  prudent  competitors  shrink. 
And  there  is  not  a  railroad  manager  in  the  country 
who  would  not  run  his  road  through  an  un- 
inhabited desert  in  full  confidence  that  it  contains 
resources  which  it  only  needs  the  transports- 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  121 

tion  facilities  he  will  provide  to  induce  others 
as  sanguine  as  himself  to  develop  or  unearth. 
This  is  peculiarly  true  of  the  west  where  every 
man  is  a  fanatic  as  to  his  own  capacity  and  the 
value  of  his  property,  and  where  this  sublime 
self-confidence  is  as  infectious  as  mountain  fever 
and  soon  attacks  the  stranger. 

But  there  is  danger  in  this  laudable  pride  of 
country  and  in  this  over-weaning  self-confidence, 
tor,  vast  as  our  resources  are,  they  are  not  in- 
exhaustible. Mr.  Carnegie  in  his  Saint  Andrews' 
address  assigned  to  our  own  iron  deposits  a 
life  of  sixty  years,  while  Professor  Shaler  in  his 
book — unfortunately  his  last— on  the  ''Earth 
and  Man/'  reduces  that  span  to  fifty  years. 
Our  anthracite  is  a  rapidly  vanishing  quantity, 
and  vast  as  are  our  bituminous  coal  fields,  they 
will  not  last  forever.  And  we  are  using  nature's 
resources  with  most  wasteful  prodigality.  We 
are  draining  our  prolific  cow  to  the  last  drop — 
skimming  off  the  cream,  and  not  even  making 
cheese  out  of  the  skimmed  milk.  We  are  saving 
only  60  per  cent  of  our  anthracite,  burning  away 
the  by-product  of  90  per  cent  of  all  our  coke 
ovens,  and  cutting  down  our  vast  forests  with- 


1 22     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

out  replanting.  In  fact,  except  in  the  northwest, 
our  timber  resources  are  almost  exhausted,  and 
we  are  borrowing  largely  from  Canada.  And 
from  abroad  we  shall  sooner  or  later  have  to 
borrow  more  than  timber.  When  we  reach  that 
stage,  we  will  make  less  money,  which  will  be 
far  from  an  evil,  for  it  may  oblige  us  to  replace 
some  of  our  pelf  with  humility  and  meekness  of 
spirit.  Even  to-day  we  do  not  suffer  acutely 
from  looking  abroad  for  some  of  the  material  of 
our  prosperous  manufacturers.  We  do  not  make 
any  pig  tin — on  the  contrary,  import  it  from 
the  Malay  Peninsula,  whence  we  do  not  refuse 
to  draw  it,  though  it  is  made  by  Chinese  labor; 
and  yet  our  tin  plate  industry  is  flourishing. 
And  so,  as  our  resources  fail,  we  shall  not  lack 
for  raw  material  as  long  as  the  world's  supply 
lasts,  for  transportation  charges  by  land  and 
water  will  grow  steadily  less,  and  we  cannot  but 
believe  that  many  of  the  selfish  barriers  which 
now  separate  nations  commercially  will  be  swept 
away  by  the  spread  of  saner  notions  on  political 
economy,  and  more  unselfish  international  re- 
lations. 
The  extraordinary  wealth  which  has  been  accu- 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  123 

mulatcd  of  late  years,  primarily  through  the 
marvellous  growth  of  our  railroads  and  the  rapid 
development  and  utilization  of  our  resources  of 
all  kinds,  due  to  that  railroad  extension,  is  un- 
doubtedly a  menace.  But  the  grave  question 
is  how  to  right  the  wrong  and  avert  the  dangers 
without  retarding  the  progress;  how  we  can  cure 
the  patient  without  killing  him.  For  if  a  few 
of  the  leaders  in  the  movement  have  become  too 
rich,  their  proportion  of  the  gross  turnover  has 
been  small. 

The  people  at  large,  quite  apart  from  the 
multitude  who  hold  the  stock  of  the  great  cor- 
porations, benefit  to  the  extent  of  at  least  three- 
quarters  of  the  gross  expenditure.  This  is 
substantially  true  of  all  our  successful  enter- 
prises. Of  the  statistics  of  the  unsuccessful 
ventures,  in  which  capital  loses  a  great  deal  of 
its  money,  we  hear  little.  But  the  operations  of 
the  successful  ones  are  on  such  a  stupendous 
scale  nowadays  that  the  comparatively  small 
amount  received  by  those  whom  we  call  the 
promoter  per  unit  of  output,  whether  in  the  form 
of  material  or  in  the  form  of  energy,  represent 
those  great  private  fortunes  which  are  a  stimu- 


1 24     Relation  of  Railway  Transportation  to 

lant  to  some,  a  source  of  jealousy  to  others,  and 
of  wonderment  to  all.  To  many  of  their  possessors 
they  are  certainly  a  cause  of  keen  heart  search- 
ing, for  some  of  them  certainly  find  great  difficulty 
in  disposing  of  their  accumulation,  and  we  may 
therefore  assume  that  they  feel  acutely  the 
responsibility  of  its  possession,  and  of  wisely 
administering  it.  To  check  the  growth  in  future 
of  their  fortunes  by  legislation  is  the  evident, 
if  not  the  avowed  or  understood,  object  of  much 
state  and  federal  legislation.  If  it  can  succeed 
in  doing  so  without  checking  the  development 
of  the  enterprises  which  have  created  these 
fortunes,  no  harm  will  certainly  be  done,  and 
many  of  us  will  thereby  be  saved  from  temptation. 
But  probably  the  evil  will  remedy  itself,  for 
in  making  haste  to  be  rich  every  one  has  been 
making  corresponding  haste  in  depleting  our 
national  resources — cropping  and  recropping  our 
fertile  prairie  lands,  and  not  restoring  their 
fertility  by  manure — emptying  our  mines  more 
rapidly  in  a  decade  than  old  Europe  has  emptied 
hers  in  as  many  centuries — cutting  down  our 
forests,  and  leaving  the  refuse  lumber  a  prey 
to  fire,  and  covering  our  lands  with  railroads 


Mining  and  Metallurgy  125 

by  which  these  extraordinary  results  have  been 
brought  about.  We  stand  aghast  at  our  own 
handiwork,  and  wonder  what  will  be  the  out- 
come. The  outcome  will  inevitably  be  a  more 
modest  pace  and  a  saner  frame  of  mind  as  our 
resources  become  gradually  exhausted  and  that 
some  men  will  have  to  work  harder  for  less  pay. 

But  it  will  not  be  the  mechanical  engineer,  or 
the  mining  engineer,  or  the  chemist,  who  will 
suffer;  for  as  we  begin  to  feel  the  pinch  of  want 
and  really  appreciate  that  our  resources  are  not 
illimitable,  and  that  we  must  stop  wasting  and 
use  some  economy,  we  will  be  obliged  to  look 
to  you  to  save  us.  By-products  have  been  a 
by-word  among  us  heretofore.  Ere  long  they 
will  be  here  as  elsewhere  the  profitable  items  of 
our  industries,  and  by  reducing  waste  and  intro- 
ducing economies  the  nation  will  expect  you  to 
maintain  the  supreme  position  it  has  secured. 
This  high  standing  has  been  attained  by  the 
most  energetic  use  of  nature's  resources.  You 
must  do  it  by  the  introduction  of  economies 
we  now  almost  despise,  and  by  inventing  sub- 
stitutes for  material  which  is  now  cheap  and 
abundant,  but  will  be  ere  long  scarce  and  costly. 


126  Mining  and  Metallurgy 

We  already  see  a  symptom  of  the  coming  change, 
an  unconscious  prophecy  as  it  were  of  future 
development,  in  the  increasing  substitution  of 
concrete,  the  ingredients  of  which  on  the  surface 
of  the  earth  are  substantially  inexhaustible,  for 
the  metals  which  soon  will  become  rare,  and  in 
the  generation  of  heat  by  the  conversion  of 
force  instead  of  exclusively  by  the  combustion 
of  carbon. 

You  have  therefore  before  you  for  solution 
problems  of  most  momentous  importance,  not 
only  to  this  country  but  to  the  world  at  large, 
for,  thank  heaven,  selfishness  may  build  tariff 
walls  against  trade  and  folly,  or  ambition  embroil 
nations  in  war,  but  no  one  has  yet  been  able 
to  confine  the  divine  prerogative  of  free  thought 
or  of  free  speech  by  those  brave  enough  to  use 
it,  and  that  I  am  sure  you  will  be. 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

Paper  read  at  the  Meeting  of  the  American  Institute  of  Mining 
Engineers  (Toronto,  July,  1907) 

THOUGH  liberality  is  not  supposed  to  be  a 
prominent  trait  of  the  Scottish  character,  Canada 
owes  to  a  Scotchman,  Sir  William  Macdonald, 
more  than  to  any  other  of  its  people,  not  only 
wise  ideas,  but  pecuniary  help  towards  extending 
education;  and  another  Scotchman,  in  New 
York,  has  sumptuously  housed  under  one  roof 
three  branches  of  the  engineering  fraternity,  of 
which  we  are  one. 

Having  thus  created  us  members  of  the  same 
family — for  the  metaphorical  meaning  of  house 
and  kinship  is  identical — Mr.  Carnegie  expresses 
more  emphatically  than  even  he  could  in  words, 
that,  by  affording  facilities  for  closest  inter- 
course, he  invites  the  mechanical,  electrical,  and 
mining  engineers  to  participate  in  the  freest 

interchange  of  idea  and  experience,  and  to  cor- 

127 


1 28  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

relate  and  combine  the  results  of  their  studies  and 
activities;  and,  being  members  of  the  same  house- 
hold, to  banish  reserve  and  secrecy. 

And  now  we,  the  members  of  the  American 
Institute  of  Mining  Engineers,  assemble  as  though 
we  were  at  home  in  a  neighboring  country.  For 
whether  we  meet  in  Canada,  in  England,  or  else- 
where, the  Institute  is  always  received  as  though 
no  political  or  geographical  divisions  separated 
its  members  from  those  of  congenial  associations 
in  the  land  of  its  host.  In  truth,  the  title  which 
we  have  assumed  claims  for  the  sphere  of  our 
activities  the  whole  American  continent,  regard- 
less of  such  trifling  details  as  boundary  lines. 
The  fact  that  we  must  combine  to  communicate 
each  other's  experience,  to  discuss  our  difficul- 
ties, and  to  seek  each  other's  aid  in  solving  the 
intricate  problems  that  so  often  present  them- 
selves in  the  course  of  our  professional  life,  is 
an  acknowledgment  of  our  individual  helpless- 
ness; and  therefore  an  argument  for  united  effort. 
But  no  effort  can  be  of  any  value  if  there  is  an 
underlying  suspicion  of  reserve  and  lack  of  candor 
in  our  treatment  of  the  technical  questions  which 
it  is  our  province  at  these  meetings  to  discuss. 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  129 

Yet  there  are  limits  to  the  extent  to  which  we 
may  go  as  officials  of  public  companies.  We 
know  that  even  as  professional  men  it  is  not 
always  easy  to  reconcile  principles  with  practice, 
and  on  this  subject  of  sincerity  and  transparent 
diffusion  of  our  experience  there  is  some  slight 
difference  of  opinion  and  great  difficulty  of  applica- 
tion. Few  of  us  are  as  favorably  situated  as  the 
college  professors,  whose  first  duty  is  to  un- 
bosom themselves  to  their  students  of  all  they 
know,  and  perhaps  of  a  little  which  they  only 
suppose  they  know.  The  most  of  us  are  paid 
officials  of  corporations  whose  raison  d'etre  is  to 
make  money,  and  whose  executive  officers  some- 
times, not  without  some  reason,  consider  their 
trade  secrets  as  part  of  their  capital.  Some 
companies  confide  these  secrets  to  the  honor  of 
their  technical  workers  under  as  strict  rules  as 
those  imposed  on  their  cashier  in  the  distribution 
of  their  money.  Unless,  therefore,  our  em- 
ployers permit,  we  as  employees  are  under  pledge 
of  secrecy.  Many  large  manufacturing,  mining, 
and  metallurgical  concerns  put  no  restriction 
upon  the  freedom  of  their  technical  staff,  but 
some  of  our  largest  certainly  impose  on  their 


130  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

employees  absolute  silence  as  to  all  that  trans- 
pires within  their  laboratories  or  workshops. 

If  the  question  were  left  to  us  alone,  it  would 
be  easy  of  solution.  Our  reliance  on  one  another, 
as  workmen  in  such  distinct  branches  of  engi- 
neering as  civil,  mechanical,  electrical,  and  min- 
ing, is  so  close  that  we  must  cooperate  in  every 
large  enterprise  we  undertake.  We  cannot  suc- 
ceed singly,  for  few  of  us  claim  to  be  so  ency- 
clopaedic in  our  knowledge  or  universal  in  our 
experience  as  to  make  it  safe  to  rely  on  our  own 
acquaintance  with  the  practical  details  of  every 
one  of  these  important  departments.  We  there- 
fore seek  each  other's  assistance,  and  conse- 
quently share  in  each  other's  secrets;  for  every 
man's  special  knowledge  is  to  the  other  man, 
who  is  more  ignorant  or  inexperienced,  a  secret, 
or  a  "mystery,"  as  old  tradesmen  and  profes- 
sional men  used  to  call  it. 

Every  industrial  advance  brings  us  closer 
together  and  makes  it  more  impossible  to  act 
independently.  Till  very  recently  the  civil  en- 
gineer surveyed  and  located  the  line  of  railroad; 
the  metallurgist  made  the  rails  and  the  iron  and 
steel  for  the  locomotives;  the  mechanical  engi- 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  131 

neer  designed  the  equipment,  and  what  was  left 
for  the  electrician  to  do  was  to  string  the  tele- 
graph wires.  Now  all  this  is  changed.  The 
electrical  engineer  is,  in  importance,  springing 
into  the  first  rank;  and  he  requires  such  special 
acquaintance  with  the  mysterious  forces,  whose 
distribution  and  useful  energy  he  handles  with 
so  much  audacity,  and  yet  safety,  that  few  of 
us  are  particularly  anxious  to  meddle  with  his 
operations. 

Or,  to  take  a  mining  instance,  in  reaching  a 
decision  as  to  the  adoption  in  underground  or 
overground  haulage  of  electricity  or  compressed 
air,  even  in  metalliferous  mines,  the  verdict  must 
depend  on  so  many  delicate  and  purely  technical 
considerations  that  few  superintendents  or  general 
managers  would  consider  themselves  sufficiently 
informed  to  commit  themselves  until  their  me- 
chanical and  electrical  advisers  had  marshaled 
all  the  facts  and  arguments  for  and  against  each 
system.  I  need  not  cite  other  instances  in  which 
cooperation  is  demanded  in  the  carrying-out  of 
almost  every  modern  enterprise,  or  in  the  equip- 
ment of  the  complicated  mechanisms  which  have 
replaced  the  simpler  contrivances  of  our  fore- 


132  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

fathers.  The  modern  steamship  exceeds  Colum- 
bus's  caravels  in  size  and  complexity  of  con- 
struction as  much  as  does  a  limited  train  an  old 
stage-coach.  And  in  proportion  to  the  multitude 
of  their  parts  and  the  tremendous  energy  of  the 
forces  which  must  be  called  into  play  to  move 
them,  is  the  diversity  of  knowledge,  talent,  and 
skill  required  to  design,  construct  and  operate 
them.  As  I  have  said,  therefore,  if  it  depended 
upon  us  alone  there  would  be  no  difference  of 
opinion  as  to  the  necessity  of  perfect  open- 
mindedness,  and  as  little  backwardness  in  apply- 
ing this  principle  to  practice. 

I  think,  moreover,  that  many  of  us  are  also 
convinced  that  open-mindedness  to  the  sugges- 
tions of  others  is  a  useful  quality  to  carry  into 
our  work,  even  after  we  and  our  scientific  staff, 
in  our  joint  wisdom,  have  cooperated  in  for- 
mulating and  laying  out  our  plans.  Every 
draftsman  in  our  offices,  every  master  mechanic 
in  our  shops,  every  foreman  in  our  mines,  is  an 
expert  in  his  particular  line,  and  may  be  supposed 
to  be  familiar  with  minutiae  which  have  escaped 
our  observation,  or,  to  put  it  frankly,  may  know 
more  than  we  do  ourselves  on  some  of  the  in- 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  133 

numerable  details  which  make  up  the  sum  total 
of  the  questions  on  which  we  have  ultimately 
to  pass.  The  suggestions  coming  from  such 
subordinate  sources  may  not  always  be  worthy 
of  acceptance;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is 
never  wise  on  our  part  to  turn  a  deaf  ear  or  a 
disdainful  shoulder  to  them.  In  our  own  small 
way  and  work,  we  feel  sometimes  almost  ashamed 
to  accept  credit  accorded  to  us  for  ingenuity  and 
foresight  in  devising  either  mechanical  or  in- 
dustrial novelties,  or  in  organizing  enterprises, 
when  we  recall  the  hints  from  others  which  have 
suggested  thoughts  to  ourselves.  For  though 
undoubtedly,  especially  in  the  most  imposing 
cases,  the  one  inspiring  mind  has  conceived  the 
idea,  either  of  the  invention  or  of  the  enterprise, 
only  by  the  cooperation  of  a  number  of  sub- 
ordinate agents,  who  often  belong  to  the  multi- 
tude of  the  unknown  and  forgotten,  could  the 
idea  have  been  worked  out  to  the  glory  and  the 
profit  of  the  inventor  or  promoter.  It  is  always 
difficult  to  decide  how  much  of  the  result  should 
be  passed  to  the  credit  of  the  conspicuous  man 
and  how  much  to  that  of  the  hard-working, 
plodding,  unimaginative  grubber  among  details, 


134  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

or  to  the  brilliant,  erratic,  and,  because  erratic, 
unsuccessful  fellow  who  does  not  a  little  of  the 
world's  work,  and  yet  gets  so  little  of  the  praise 
or  the  gold.  But  this  is  certain,  that  in  our 
own  work,  whether  it  be  conspicuous  or  not,  we 
shall  always  benefit  by  inviting  suggestions  from 
the  humblest  of  our  co'Jperators,  encouraging 
them  to  think  independently,  and  fearlessly  to 
express  their  thoughts.  That  this  is  already  one 
of  the  prominent  qualities  of  American  industry 
is  manifest  from  the  large  number  of  patents 
which  are  taken  out  by  inconspicuous  laborers 
in  the  fields  of  engineering,  especially  of  me- 
chanics. 

I  recently  went,  one  Friday  morning,  into  our 
purchasing  department  and  found  every  desk 
empty,  and  all  the  clerks  assembled  in  the  mana- 
ger's room.  He  had  found  it  conducive  to  the 
most  efficient  conduct  of  his  office  to  assemble 
all  his  staff  once  a  week  for  free  discussion  as  to 
the  most  economical  distribution  of  work.  The 
result  was  that  instead  of  late  hours  and  over* 
time  the  necessary  day's  work  was  overtaken  very 
easily  within  office  hours;  for  suggestions  from 
the  men  actually  engaged  were  found  to  be 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  135 

worth  more  than  those  from  the  men  merely 
superintending.  The  youngest  were  not  snubbed 
if  they  ventured  to  make  a  remark;  and  thus 
the  spirit  of  pride  and  cooperation  pervaded  the 
whole  group. 

We  have  all  heard  how  Mr.  Carnegie  is  said 
to  have  stimulated  the  rivalry  of  his  superin- 
tendents and  heads  of  departments  by  getting 
them  to  meet  at  intervals  over  an  excellent 
lunch,  where  around  the  table  all  jealousy  van- 
ished, and  little  technical  secrets,  which  are 
liable  to  exist  even  among  friends,  were  revealed. 
But  good  cheer  is  not,  or  should  not  be,  necessary 
to  make  the  great  brotherhood  of  technical 
workers  unfold  their  sympathy  and  unbosom 
their  secrets  to  one  another. 

But  we  return  to  our  main  subject.  How 
far  and  how  completely  should  even  corpora- 
tions and  industrial  concerns  permit  and  en- 
courage the  interchange  of  information?  I  am 
inclined  to  think  that  few  limits  should  be  set; 
for  every  limitation  means  the  concealment  of 
some  fact  or  some  principle  which  only  if  re- 
vealed can  be  developed  to  its  full  significance 
and  utility.  As  a  rule  this  can  be  best  done  by 


136  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

the  action  of  many  minds  and  many  hands. 
Till  developed  it  does  not  yield  its  full  advantage 
to  even  the  original  discoverer,  for  he  alone, 
unaided,  in  the  solitude  of  his  laboratory  or 
behind  the  bars  of  his  factory,  without  the  prac- 
tical assistance  of  his  fellow-workers,  rarely 
brings  his  original  germinal  idea  into  efficient, 
practical  utility. 

Were  we  free  to  appeal  to  purely  altruistic  mo- 
tives, it  would  therefore  be  superfluous  to  argue 
in  favor  of  complete  knowledge-  and  experience- 
sharing,  but  profit-sharing  is  after  all  the  im- 
pelling motive  of  industrial  advance  to-day,  as 
it  has  been  in  all  ages,  and  to  reconcile  the 
admitted  evils  of  secrecy  with  the  admitted 
advantages  of  publicity,  the  patent  laws  have 
been  framed.  They  have  always  given  the 
patentee  the  right  to  use  either  in  his  person 
or  through  his  agent  his  invention  or  discovery 
for  a  limited  number  of  years,  provided  he 
describes  it  so  fully  that  it  can  be  practiced 
by  one  skilled  in  the  art.  The  publicity 
and  knowledge  conveyed  by  the  specification 
stimulates  the  inventive  faculties  of  others,  and 
patented  and  unpatented  improvements,  along 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  137 

the  line  of  the  original  invention,  demonstrate 
both  the  value  of  publicity  and  the  cupidity  of 
men,  even  of  the  technico-scientific  class.  Among 
the  great  inventors  of  our  day  was  Sir  Henry 
Bessemer.  Before  the  Royal  Commission,  ap- 
pointed to  suggest  revision  of  the  British  patent 
laws,  he  gave  evidence,  some  of  which  he  has 
embodied,  with  very  suggestive  comments,  in  his 
autobiography.*  Before  he  became  famous  he 
devised  machinery  for  making  bronze  powder, 
and  manufactured  the  powder  in  secret.  Of  this 
he  says : 

"While  referring  to  patents  for  inventions,  I 
cannot  refrain  from  pointing  to  this  particular 
invention  of  bronze  powder  as  an  example  that 
may  advantageously  be  borne  in  mind  by  those 
short-sighted  persons  who  object  to  grants  of 
letters-patent.  There  can  be  no  doubt  of  the 
fact  that  the  security  offered  by  the  patent  law 
to  persons  who  expend  large  sums  of  money  and 
valuable  time  in  pursuing  novel  inventions, 
results  in  many  new  and  important  improve- 
ments in  our  manufactures,  which  otherwise  it 

*  Sir  Henry  Bessemer,  F.R.S.:  An  Autobiography,  pp.  82 
to  85.  London:  Offices  of  Engineering  (1905). 


138  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

would  be  sheer  madness  for  men  to  waste  their 
energy  and  their  money  in  attempting.  But  in 
this  particular  case  the  conditions  were  most 
unfavorable  for  patenting,  owing  to  the  fact 
that  the  article  produced  was  only  a  powder, 
and  could  not  be  identified  as  having  been  made 
by  any  particular  form  of  mechanism.  There- 
fore it  could  not  be  adequately  protected  by 
patent;  moreover,  by  my  machinery,  the  cost  of 
production,  if  only  paid  for  at  the  ordinary  rates 
of  wages,  did  not  exceed  one-thirtieth  of  the 
selling-price  of  the  article.  This  fact  alone 
offered  an  irresistible  temptation  to  others  to 
evade  the  inventor's  claims,  and  so  rendered  the 
patent  law  a  most  inadequate  protection.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  great  value  of  a  small  bulk 
of  the  material  made  it  possible  to  carry  on  the 
manufacture  in  secret,  and  this  method  of  manu- 
facture was  rendered  the  more  feasible  by  making 
each  different  class  of  machine  self-acting,  and 
thereby  dispensing  entirely  with  a  host  of  skilled 
manipulators.  It  may  therefore  be  fairly  con- 
sidered, so  far  as  this  particular  article  was  con- 
cerned, that  there  were,  in  effect,  no  patent 
laws  in  existence. 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  139 

"Now  let  us  see  what  the  public  has  had  to 
pay  for  not  being  able  to  give  this  security  to 
the  inventor.  To  illustrate  this  point,  I  may 
repeat  the  simple  fact  that  the  first  order  for 
bronze  powder  obtained  by  my  traveller  was  for 
two  pounds  of  pale-gold,  at  eighty  shillings  per 
pound  net,  for  the  Coalbrookdale  Iron  Company. 
I  may  further  state  that,  in  consequence  of  the 
necessity  for  strict  secrecy,  I  had  made  arrange- 
ments with  three  young  men  (my  wife's  brothers), 
to  whom  salaries  were  paid  far  beyond  the  cost 
of  mere  manual  labor  (of  which,  indeed,  but 
little  was  required).  My  friend  Mr.  Young 
desired  to  occupy  the  position  of  sleeping  part- 
ner only,  and  not  be  troubled  with  any  details 
of  the  manufacture;  so  I  entered  into  a  contract 
with  him  to  pay  all  salaries,  find  raw  materials, 
pay  rent,  engine  power,  and  bring  the  whole 
produce  of  the  manufactory  intd  stock,  in  one- 
ounce  packages,  ready  for  delivery,  at  a  cost 
for  all  qualities,  of  five  shillings  and  sixpence  per 
pound;  after  which  he  and  I  shared  equally  all 
profits  of  the  sale.  It  is  rather  curious  a  coin- 
cidence that  the  one-ounce  bottles  of  gold  paint 
were  labelled  five  shillings  and  sixpence  each,  off 


140  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

which  the    retailer  was    allowed    a  liberal   dis- 
count. 

"Had  the  invention  been  patented,  it  would 
have  become  public  property  in  fourteen  years 
from  the  date  of  the  patent,  after  which  period 
the  public  would  have  been  able  to  buy  bronze 
powder  at  its  present  market  price,  viz.,  from 
two  shillings  and  threepence  to  two  shillings  and 
ninepence  per  pound.  But  this  important  secret 
was  kept  for  about  thirty-five  years,  and  the 
public  had  to  pay  excessively  high  prices  for 
twenty-one  years  longer  than  they  would  have 
done  had  the  invention  become  public  property 
in  fourteen  years,  as  it  would  have  been  if  pat- 
ented. Even  this  does  not  represent  all  the 
disadvantages  resulting  from  secret  manufac- 
tures. While  every  detail  of  production  was  a 
profound  secret,  there  were  no  improvements 
made  by  the  outside  public  in  any  one  of  the 
machines  employed  during  the  whole  thirty-five 
years;  whereas  during  the  fourteen  years,  if  the 
invention  had  been  patented  and  published, 
there  would,  in  all  probability,  have  been  many 
improved  machines  invented,  and  many  novel 
features  applied  to  totally  different  manufactures. 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  141 

"I  have  lingered  long  over  this  subject  of 
bronze  powder,  because  it  is  one  which  has  had 
great  influence  on  my  career;  it  was  taken  up 
at  a  period  when  my  energy  and  my  endurance 
and  my  faith  in  my  own  powers,  were  at  their 
highest;  and  as  I  look  on  all  the  incidents  sur- 
rounding it,  through  the  lapse  of  time  and  the 
many  changes  of  the  fifty  years  since  it  was 
undertaken,  I  wonder  how  I  had  the  courage  to 
attack  a  subject  so  complicated  and  so  difficult, 
and  one  on  which  there  were  no  data  to  assist 
me.  There  were  not  even  the  details  of  former 
failures  to  hold  up  the  finger  of  warning,  or  point 
out  a  possible  path  to  pursue,  for  no  one  had 
yet  ventured  to  try  and  replace  the  delicate 
manipulation  which  experts  had  made  their  own, 
both  in  Japan  and  China,  where  texts  and  prayers 
printed  with  bronze  were  offered  up  at  the  shrine 
of  Confucius  two  thousand  years  before  I  had 
ever  seen  a  particle  of  bronze  powder." 

He  concludes  this  first  reference  to  his  powder 
in  the  following  paragraph: 

"In  closing  these  details  of  the  bronze  powder 
manufacture,  I  may  say  that,  later  on  the  hand- 
some royalties  paid  by  may.  steel  licensees  ren- 


142  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

dered  the  bronze  powder  business  no  longer  neces- 
sary to  me  as  a  source  of  income ;  and  I  had  then 
the  extreme  satisfaction  of  presenting  the  works 
to  my  brother-in-law,  Richard  Allen,  who  had, 
with  so  much  caution,  successfully  kept,  for  more 
than  thirty  years,  a  secret  for  which,  he  per- 
fectly well  knew,  some  thousands  of  pounds 
would  have  been  given  him  at  any  moment." 

But  he  returns  to  the  subject  of  patents  when 
discussing  another  invention  of  his,  that  for 
making  optical  and  plate  glass,  the  value  of 
which,  for  some  reason  or  other,  the  trade  has 
never  appreciated.  He  says  (pp.  117,  118): 

"There  is  one  point  in  connection  with  pat- 
ented inventions  upon  which  I  have  always  felt 
strongly.  I  have  maintained  that  the  public 
derive  a  great  advantage  by  useful  inventions 
being  patented,  because  the  invention  so  secured 
is  valuable  property,  and  the  owner  is  necessarily 
desirous  of  turning  that  property  to  the  greatest 
advantage;  he  either  himself  manufactures  the 
patented  article,  or  he  grants  licenses  to  others 
to  do  so.  In  cither  case  the  public  reap  the 
advantage  of  being  able  to  purchase  a  better  or 
cheaper  article  than  was  before  known  to  them, 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  143 

due  to  the  inventor's  perseverance  in  forcing 
his  property  upon  the  market.  But  if  a  novel 
article  or  manufacture  is  simply  proposed  by  a 
writer,  and  published  in  the  technical  press  or 
in  newspapers,  as  a  rule  (almost  without  a  single 
exception)  no  manufacturer  will  go  to  the  trouble 
and  expense  of  trying  to  work  out  the  proposed 
invention.  He  says  to  himself:  'I  shall  not  risk 
the  expense  necessary  to  develop  this  new  idea,  for 
it  may  entirely  fail;  or  even  if  I  succeed,  its  de- 
velopment will  cost  me  much  more  than  it  will 
cost  other  manufacturers,  who  will  immediately 
avail  themselves  of  it  if  I  succeed;  no,  let  some 
one  else  try  it;'  and  so  the  invention  is  lost  to 
the  world  in  consequence  of  having  been  given 
away.  This  loss  to  the  public  is  equally  the  case 
with  patents  that  are  not  taken  up;  and  one  of 
the  simplest  and  most  effective  inventions  which 
I  have  ever  made  may  be  here  cited  as  an  ex- 
ample, as  it  formed  part  of  the  novel  system  of 
plate  glass  manufacture  just  referred  to." 

After  describing  his  plate-glass  invention  and 
its  public  neglect,  he  says  (p.  122) : 

"From  what  I  have  said  I  think  I  have  shown 
that,  however  self-evident  an  invention  may  be, 


144  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

or  however  advantageous  it  might  be  to  a  manu- 
facturer, if  it  is  public  property  he  will  not  touch 
it." 

Sir  Henry  was  doubtless  correct  in  asserting 
that  under  the  impulse  of  self-interest  inven- 
tions are  pushed  by  the  inventor  more  vigorously 
than  if  he  had  merely  the  scientific  credit  due 
and  given  to  investigators  to  spur  him  on.  But 
he  really  gives  us  an  argument  against  patents 
when  he  describes  the  apathy  of  the  public  to 
his  glass  patents.  His  steel  patents  he  worked 
out  himself  and  brought  to  perfection  after  years 
of  heavy  expense  and  labor,  and  by  adopting 
certain  modifications  to  fit  special  cases.  His 
plate-glass  patents  he  never  himself  applied, 
but  they  would  probably  have  been  loaded 
down  with  royalties  which  the  trade  did  not 
care  to  pay  while  taking  the  risk  of  applying 
them  to  practice.  As  to  his  bronze  powder,  he 
would  probably  have  made  far  more  out  of  it 
had  he  reduced  the  exorbitant  prices  and  in- 
creased the  demand,  even  while  manufacturing 
it  behind  closed  doors. 

It  is,  however,  foreign  to  my  purpose  to  discuss 
the  patent  laws,  except  casually  as  they  bear 


Secrecy  in  the  Ajts  145 

upon  the  subject  of  secrecy  in  the  arts.  Sir 
Henry's  generalizations  are  substantially  correct, 
but  they  are  too  sweeping;  for  there  have  been 
great  inventions  which  the  public  has  not  been 
backward  in  using,  though  they  were  freely 
given  to  the  world.  One's .  thoughts  pass  with 
pleasure  from  the  contemplation  of  the  money- 
making  inventors  and  investigators  to  such 
prophets  and  apostles  of  science  as  Sir  Michael 
Faraday.  Sir  Michael's  profound  and  original 
investigations  into  electricity  and  magnetism 
gave  the  world  the  dynamo.  Though  he  did  not 
work  out  the  mechanical  details  of  a  practical 
generator,  he  undoubtedly  invented  appliances 
which  might  have  been  used  for  making  a  strong 
basis-claim  for  a  patent.  But  nothing  could 
have  been  more  repulsive  to  his  spirit  or  foreign 
to  his  high  aim  in  life  than  gauging  his  time 
and  talents  by  a  mere  money  standard.  He 
lived  contentedly  on  the  small  salary  he  re- 
ceived from  the  Royal  Institution,  preparing  his 
lectures  to  children  with  as  much  care  as  he  be- 
stowed on  those  delivered  before  the  Institution 
which  made  him  famous;  and  turning  his  great 
learning  and  power  of  investigation  to  the  nation's 


146  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

good  in  return  for  very  scanty  remuneration, 
for  he  deliberately  decided  to  devote  his  life 
to  scientific  research  for  truth's  sake,  rather 
than  to  use  his  vast  attainments  in  the  service 
of  Mammon.  At  the  commencement  of  his 
career,  Faraday  added  to  his  salary  from  the 
Royal  Institution  by  what  he  called  commercial 
work.  At  first,  his  average  earnings  from  this 
source  were  £240  per  year.  By  1831  they  reached 
£1090.  By  1838  they  had  shrunk  to  nothing; 
for  in  the  meantime  his  great  discovery  of  magneto- 
electricity  was  made,  and  his  thoughts  were  so 
intently  directed  to  his  experimental  work  that 
no  time  could  be  spared  for  money-making. 

Faraday's  mind  was  too  absorbed  in  wonder- 
ment and  almost  religious  fervor,  as  the  secrets 
of  nature  revealed  themselves,  for  sordidness 
in  any  form  to  find  lodgment.  He  wasted  his 
energy  neither  in  money-making  nor  in  cap- 
tiously defending  his  discoveries  and  great  con- 
ceptions from  supposed  infringement  by  other 
scholars.  He  never  forgot,  despite  his  brilliant 
original  work,  that  generally  the  great  inves- 
tigators only  lay  the  keystone  in  the  arch  which 
many  less  gifted  workers  have  been  erecting 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  147 

stone  by  stone.  He  did  not  consider  it  any 
detraction  from  his  honor  that  he  was  permitted 
only  to  crown  the  structure  which  others  had 
helped  to  build  from  the  foundation  up.  They 
are  the  greatest  among  the  great  who  appreciate 
this  limitation  and  recognize  what  they  owe  to 
others.  Faraday  knew  that  his  discoveries  gave 
him  but  imperfect  glimpses  of  some  of  the  laws 
and  phenomena  of  nature,  which  men,  through 
their  ignorance  and  prejudice,  are  slow  in  under- 
standing, but  these  laws  sooner  cease  to  be  secrets 
if  we  could  only  disabuse  our  minds  of  false  con- 
ceptions, see  facts  as  facts  instead  of  as  argu- 
ments for  our  theories,  and  then  work  together 
with  single-heartedness. 

Faraday  felt  also,  as  every  true  disciple  of 
science  should  feel,  that  when  we  penetrate  to 
the  discovery  of  even  the  least  important  of  the 
facts  of  nature,  we  are  unveiling  one  of  God's 
gifts  to  humanity.  If  that  be  so,  we  may  well 
ask  ourselves,  what  right  have  we  to  draw  the 
curtain  over  it  and  conceal  it  again  from  God's 
children  in  order  that  we  may  make  money  out 
of  it?  Looked  at  from  this  point  of  view,  we  may 
well  question  the  right  to  buy  men's  thoughts; 


148  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

and  when  through  their  thoughts  we  have  un- 
raveled some  of  nature's  secrets,  and  learnt 
something  to  our  profit,  use  our  power  and  an- 
other's necessities  to  impose  secrecy?  We  are 
enslaving  a  human  mind,  and  can  any  slavery  be 
worse?  A  natural  phenomenon  or  new  force,  once 
so  understood  that  it  can  be  controlled,  is  it  not 
as  much  a  gift  of  God  as  rain  and  sunlight,  and 
therefore  part  of  the  heritage  of  all  mankind? 
Corporate  wealth  and  corporate  energy  are  doing 
much  for  mankind,  despite  the  fact  that  of  cor- 
porate shortcomings  we  hear  just  now  more 
than  we  do  of  corporate  benefactions;  but 
corporate  influence  will  have  reached  its  most 
beneficent  development,  when  the  wealth  and 
activity  and  masterful  management  of  the  able 
men  who  wield  it  are  united  to  the  knowledge 
and  skill  of  their  technical  staff  in  not  only  dis- 
covering but  publishing  the  truths  of  nature, 
which  they  may  be  agents  in  revealing.  Nor  are 
we  oversanguine  in  believing  that  this  high 
aspiration,  if  carried  into  practice,  would  not 
interfere  with  the  lower  motive  of  their  existence, 
money-making. 
Sir  Michael  Faraday  is  not  the  only  worker  in 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  149 

the  field  of  practical  science  who  has  given  the 
results  of  his  labor  unreservedly  to  the  world. 
It  is  almost  invidious  to  single  out  instances 
when  so  many  distinguished  and  such  a  multi- 
tude of  obscure  toilers  are  working  at  the  intri- 
cate problems  of  technology  from  sheer  attach- 
ment to  truth  and  without  any  thought  of  gain. 
But  three  notable  names  may  be  mentioned  as 
representative  of  this  noble  army  of  the  unselfish 
— our  own  Prof.  Henry,  Dr.  Roentgen,  and  that 
devoted  couple,  whom  we  rank  as  one — for,  as 
husband  and  wife,  they  were  as  united  as  they 
were  one  in  love  of  science — Mons.  and  Madame 
Curie.  The  Roentgen  ray  needed  no  patents,  or 
patentable  devices,  or  any  business  organization 
to  push  its  beneficial  applications  to  the  allevia- 
tion of  suffering  humanity,  but  had  Dr.  Roentgen, 
before  describing  his  discoveries,  wished  to  make 
money  out  of  them  it  would  not  have  been  difficult 
to  concoct  patents  to  protect  his  discoveries.  And 
could  the  practical  resources  of  radial  activity  be 
measured  by  dollars,  what  a  fortune  the  bereaved 
widow  would  reap !  But  Prof.  Roentgen  enjoys  a 
better  harvest  than  royalties,  and  Madame  Curie 
would  not  exchange  for  a  mountain  of  gold  the 


]  50  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

world's  admiration  and  reverence  for  her  husband's 
memory. 

But  to  descend  to  a  lower  plane.  If  it  is  the 
fact  that  technical  science  has  progressed  of  late 
with  such  unwonted  speed  through  the  coopera- 
tion of  many  workers,  and  that  this  cooperation 
has  been  made  possible  by  the  publication  and 
exchange  of  ideas  and  experiences  in  the  technical 
and  scientific  journals,  would  not  our  progress 
be  even  more  rapid  and  thorough  if  all  barriers 
of  secrecy  were  broken  down,  and  every  en- 
couragement were  given  to  our  technical  workers 
to  describe,  in  print  and  by  conference,  their 
notions  and  their  actual  experiments?  This  is 
the  attitude  of  some,  I  may  almost  say  of  most, 
of  our  large  concerns,  but  unfortunately  it  is  not 
that  of  all.  It  is  impossible  to  compare,  as  to 
efficiency  and  profit,  works  the  gates  of  which  are 
fast  shut,  and  in  which  obscurity  and  secrecy 
are  imposed  and  practiced,  with  those  to  which 
free  admission  is  granted  and  in  which  freedom 
of  information  is  encouraged.  But  the  following 
reflections  force  themselves  upon  us  in  this  con- 
nection. We  know  that  very  few  technical  papers 
issue  from  certain  establishments;  that  on  their 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  1 5 1 

officials  silence  is  imposed;  and  that  to  these 
works  inquisitive  visitors  are  politely  but  perem- 
torily  refused  admission.  There  are  not  many 
such,  but  they  are  and  have  been  very  successful. 
But  suppose  that  in  imitation  of  their  practice 
and  regulations  all  were  tempted  to  adopt  it, 
so  that  the  same  policy  became  universal,  what 
a  sudden  paralysis  of  industry  would  follow! 
Our  secretaries  would  find  it  difficult  to  fill  even 
their  shrunken  volumes  of  transactions  with 
papers  worth  printing;  our  students  would  have 
to  content  themselves  with  the  antiquated  learn- 
ing which  their  professors  could  supply,  for  there 
would  be  no  more  summer  classes  for  practical 
work  in  mines,  smelters,  and  electrical  factories, 
and  the  professors  themselves  would  have  to 
learn  from  old  books.  Every  manufacturer  and 
smelter  would  be  obliged  to  bribe  his  neighbor's 
workmen  and  tempt  away  his  neighbor's  super- 
intendents for  information.  As  a  result,  before 
long,  the  very  works  which  now  find  it  so  profit- 
able, or  think  they  do,  to  tap  their  friends'  stock 
of  knowledge  and  experience,  and  give  nothing 
in  return,  would  be  driven  in  upon  their  own 
resources,  and  would  undoubtedly  then  find*  them 


1 52  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

not  so  complete  as  they  imagine.  Of  course  I 
am  supposing  an  impossibility,  because  the  spirit 
of  intellectual  freedom  in  our  professions  is  too 
strong  and  too  widsepread  to  submit  to  such  a 
tyranny,  and  because,  before  such  darkness  of 
ignorance  had  settled  down  on  our  great  indus- 
tries, the  most  pronounced  advocates  of  secrecy 
would  feel  and  acknowledge  the  ultimate  conse- 
quences of  concealment,  and  would  become 
reformers.  To-day  they  may  have  secrets,  as 
valuable  as  Sir  Henry's  method  of  making  plate 
glass  and  bronze  powder,  which  it  may  pay  them 
to  conceal  from  their  competitors,  so  long  as  they 
are  admitted  freely  to  their  competitor's  open 
shops,  but  even  this  is  doubtful.  For  the  spirit 
of  secrecy  is  intimately  allied  with  the  spirit  of 
suspicion  and  distrust;  and  the  mind  which  is 
always  suspecting  is  closed  tight  against  the 
admission  of  fresh  and  fair  impressions.  Being 
jealous  of  others,  it  is  prejudiced  against  their 
suggestions,  and  correspondingly  prejudiced  in 
favor  of  its  own  preconceptions.  Progress  there- 
fore ceases. 

This  is  a  temper  of  mind  foreign  to  a  new 
country  like  ours,  whose  special  industries  have 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  1 53 

not  been  established  long  enough  to  wear  grooves 
of  rigid  practice  and  sink  into  ruts  of  self-satisfied 
indifference.  About  the  best  correction  we  can 
apply  to  the  growth  of  dry-rot  is  the  banishment 
of  secrecy.  A  curious  instance  of  its  blighting 
influence  is  seen  in  some  of  the  older,  not  the  newer, 
industries  of  the  old  world.  The  iron  and  steel 
works  of  Europe  have  not  kept  pace  with  ours 
in  size  and  production,  but  the  ironmasters  of 
Great  Britain  and  Germany,  in  coke-making  and 
in  blast-furnace  economies  and  in  steel-making 
processes,  have  been  our  teachers.  Nor  have  they 
been  shy  of  communicating  their  improvements, 
or,  through  jealousy  of  our  success,  slow  in  adopting 
ours.  There  exists  no  nobler  monument  of  inter- 
national comity  in  thought  and  experience  than  the 
seventy  volumes  of  the  Proceedings  of  the  Iron  and 
Steel  Institute.  And  with  few  exceptions  the  iron 
and  steel-works  of  England,  Scotland,  Germany, 
and  France  are  open  to  any  accredited  worker 
in  the  same  domain.  Yet  before  England  was 
conspicuous  as  a  maker  of  iron,  she  was  famous 
the  world  over  for  her  copper  and  tin  production. 
But,  between  self-conceit  and  the  inbred  habits 
of  trade  secrecy,  her  copper-smelting  industry  has 


1 54  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

fallen  from  its  high  estate.  And  it  is  not  acci- 
dental, but  linked  as  closely  as  any  effect  with 
its  cause,  that  this  decline  is  in  great  part  the 
result  of  habits  of  secrecy  which  grew  with  the 
growth  of  age.  At  Swansea,  every  gate  to  the 
smelting-works  is  guarded,  and  as  a  result  it  has 
been  as  difficult  for  ignorance  to  escape  out  as  for 
suggestions  to  find  their  way  in.  Swansea  should 
still  enjoy  the  leadership  which  her  skilled  labor, 
splendid  coal,  and  commanding  maritime  situa- 
tion put  within  her  reach;  but  she  has  preferred 
to  gloat  over  her  secrets  behind  closed  doors 
rather  than  go  out  into  the  world  in  search  of  new 
business  as  well  as  technical  methods,  while  also 
inviting  the  world  to  enter  and  exchange  ideas 
with  her.  What  is  the  consequence?  New  Zea- 
land copper  comes  here  to  be  refined,  notwithstand- 
ing the  first  practical  application  of  electrolysis 
to  metals  was  made  by  Elkinton  in  England, 
and  the  Vivians  adopted  the  Manhds  method  be- 
fore Parrel  introduced  it  into  this  country. 

There  are,  however,  of  course,  exceptions  in 
England  to  this  too  prevalent  habit  of  secrecy. 
To  the  works  of  the  Rio  Tinto  at  Port  Talbot 
or  of  the  Cape  Copper  Co.  at  Briton  Ferry  in 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  1 55 

South  Wales,  where  metallurgical  novelties  have 
been  tried,  introductions  are  not  refused.  But 
the  relation  between  decay  and  suspicion  in  the 
instance  I  have  given  can  hardly  be  accidental; 
and  we  may  be  sure  that  what  is  baneful  in  its 
effects  in  Europe  is  not  likely  to  be  beneficial 
here;  for  while  the  Atlantic  separates  continents 
it  does  not  delimit  the  operation  of  laws. 

In  political  life,  vitality  is  maintained  only 
when  every  man  takes  his  full  share  as  a  debater 
in  the  discussion  of  political  questions,  and  as  a 
voter  in  the  determination  of  state  affairs.  So 
in  scientific  and  technical  matters,  the  banish- 
ment of  deceit,  mystery,  and  jealousy,  and  the 
freest  admission  of  daylight  by  means  of  the 
unreserved  diffusion  of  information  through  the 
press  and  personal  intercourse,  will  instill  into 
the  whole  body  of  workers  a  feeling  of  healthy 
rivalry,  which,  while  stimulating  their  mental 
activity,  will  correspondingly  benefit  the  financial 
interests  of  their  employers. 

-I  have  supposed  an  extreme  case — that  the 
example  set  by  our  few  secretive  establishments 
were  followed  by  all.  Let  me  imagine  a  more 
probable  issue,  such  as,  I  believe,  will  result 


1 56  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

from  the  fellowship  of  knowledge  and  experience 
which  Mr.  Carnegie,  in  presenting  to  our  national 
engineering  societies  their  new  home,  urges  them 
to  cultivate — namely,  that  all  of  our  technical 
manufacturers  will  learn  how  much  they  will  gain, 
and  not  lose,  by  encouraging  their  staff-officers  to 
study  their  neighbors'  methods,  and  by  throwing 
open  their  own  establishments,  in  turn,  to  the  freest 
criticism  of  their  competitors  in  trade.  What 
will  result?  Nothing  but  advantage,  I  believe, 
to  all  whose  wisdom  and  means  have  enabled 
them  to  provide  themselves  with  the  raw  material 
of  manufacture  on  advantageous  terms,  and  to 
locate  their  works  or  factories  at  localities  favor- 
able for  economical  operation: — Loss  only  to 
those  who,  in  any  case,  ought  to  go  out  of  business, 
because  they  have  failed  to  secure  the  conditions 
essential  to  success!  And,  above  all,  benefit  to 
the  public,  which,  after  all,  is  the  finality  we 
should  always  keep  in  view. 

How,  then,  can  these  two  cardinal  conditions 
— financial  success  and  public  approval — be  best 
attained?  Unquestionably,  by  mutual  help  and 
the  most  unreserved  publicity.  In  any  branch 
of  industry,  no  intelligent  worker  claims  that  he 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  157 

and  his  staff  have  attained  either  the  utmost 
economy  in  operation  or  the  most  thorough 
asquaintance  with  all  the  reactions  which  enter 
into  the  processes  which  he  practices.  Each 
knows  that  hundreds  of  other  intelligent  and 
well-informed  men  are  eagerly  at  work  on  the 
solution  of  the  same  problem.  Some  may  be  a 
little  cleverer  than  others,  and  some  may  have 
made  a  little  more  progress  in  certain  lines  than 
their  co-workers.  But  this  discrepancy  will  not 
necessarily  continue ;  for  the  clever  fellow  is  picked 
up  by  rival  works;  the  secret  so  carefully  guarded 
leaks  out,  and  the  disturbed  average  of  paid 
ability  and  of  stock  of  knowledge  is  restored. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  the  companies  and  their  staff 
are  unwilling  unreservedly  to  pool  their  knowledge 
and  experience,  the  advantage  of  making  into  one 
great  stock  the  accumulated  experience  and  knowl- 
edge of  these  hundreds  of  workers  is  forfeited. 
With  certain  reservations,  and  by  special  permis- 
sion, many  of  our  larger  establishments,  in  all  or 
in  certain  departments,  are  freely  open  to  each 
other's  technical  officers;  but  instead  of  being 
admitted  upon  sufferance,  they  should  be  in- 
vited in,  with  full  liberty  to  study  processes  and 


158  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

test  machinery;  for  assuredly  the  host  would 
benefit  as  much  as  the  guests  by  the  discussion 
which  would  follow  such  untrammelled  exchange  of 
ideas  and  comparisons  of  appliances  and  methods. 
I  have  referred  to  certain  limitations  to  pub- 
licity. One,  undoubtedly,  is  costs.  Under  our 
present  economic  system,  no  manufacturer  or 
miner  or  metallurgist  cares  to  give  away  his 
costs,  and  that  for  very  obvious  reasons.  What 
they  are  may  be  inferred,  but  professional  courtesy 
forbids  direct  inquiry  into  that  delicate  subject. 
This  restriction,  however,  need  not  interfere 
with  unstinted  technical  freedom  of  intercourse. 
There  is,  moreover,  another  judicious  limitation 
to  publicity.  Most  of  our  largest  concerns  are 
incorporated  and  financed  as  joint-stock  organi- 
zations, in  which  thousands  of  technically  ig- 
norant and  helpless  shareholders  are  interested. 
Unquestionably,  indiscriminate  admission  to  works 
and  mines  must  be  refused,  for  unfortunately 
there  would  be  visitors  who,  if  admitted,  after 
the  visit  would  tell  remarkable  stories,  from  actual 
observation,  with  the  view  to  affect  the  value 
of  stocks.  But  such  restrictions  do  not  affect 
the  main  proposition,  that  mercantile  concerns, 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  159 

of  every  class,  depending  for  success  on  technical 
knowledge  and  skill,  would  gain  by  the  removal 
of  restraint  on  the  thought  and  action  of  their 
technical  staff. 

I  am  not  blind  to  the  fact  that  the  same  object 
is  sought  to  be  attained  by  the  consolidation  of 
many  works  under  one  organization,  or  by  the 
encouragement  of  friendly  financial  co5peration 
among  even  competing  companies;  but  this  ten- 
dency to  consolidation  has  not  yet  succeeded 
in  obliterating  competition,  and  will  not  as  long 
as  there  are  active,  intelligent  men  among  us, 
who  prefer  to  rule  rather  than  to  be  ruled,  and  to 
manage  their  own  business  rather  than  have  it 
managed  for  them. 

On  the  benefits  or  disadvantages  of  the  present 
movement  towards  consolidation  of  works  and 
the  combination  of  capital  in  large  industrial 
undertakings,  there  is,  and  will  be,  of  course, 
considerable  diversity  of  opinion.  That  com- 
petition is  wasteful  and  is  encumbered  with  other 
evils  few  will  deny;  that  it  has  a  keenly  stimulat- 
ing effect  all  will  admit.  Yet  it  remains  to  be 
determined  whether  a  board  of  absentee  managers 
and  paid  officials  will  be  a  compensating  sub- 


160  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

stitute  for  the  ambitions,  personal  pride,  and 
tireless  energy  and  skill  of  the  individuals  who 
have  built  up  great  works  which  they  may  have 
seen,  perhaps  reluctantly,  absorbed  into  a  com- 
bination. There  are,  apart  from  the  political 
and  sociological  aspects  of  the  present  consolida- 
tion tendency,  technical  and  economical  conditions 
which  force  themselves  upon  the  consideration  of 
those  of  us  under  whose  management  works  have 
grown  from  small  to  large  dimensions.  The 
difficulty  of  maintaining  a  high  standard  of 
quality  as  the  demand  is  made  for  enormously 
increased  production  is  urgently  presenting  itself 
both  to  the  management  and  to  the  public. 
And  it  is  doubtful  whether,  after  expansion  has 
reached  the  point  where  administration  charges 
become  light,  there  is  actual  economy  in  unlimited 
expansion;  and  whether  the  most  skillful  and 
closely-managed  corporate  organization  can  re- 
place the  personal  supervision  of  a  single  mind. 
But  what  immediately  concerns  us  in  the  pre- 
sent discussion  is  the  dangerous  temptation  to 
adopt  secretive  methods  by  very  large  corpora- 
tions. 
The  larger  the  combination  grows  the  more 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  16 1 

sensitive  will  the  management  be  lest  business 
and  trade  secrets  which  they  possess,  or  think 
they  possess,  be  revealed  by  subordinate  officers. 
The  imposition,  therefore,  of  strict  rules  of  silence 
on  all  except  those  in  supreme  command  is  likely 
to  result.  If  the  absorption  of  any  one  class  of 
our  national  resources  should  pass  under  the 
control  of  any  one  organization,  the  technical 
knowledge  necessary  to  the  development  of  that 
particular  resource  would  be  of  interest  to  that 
organization  alone,  and  the  risks  of  publicity, 
and  therefore  the  evils  of  secrecy,  would  become 
a  merely  academic  question.  This  dangerous 
point,  under  our  present  industrial  system,  will 
probably  not  be  reached;  for  state  socialism, 
to  which  concentration  steadily  approaches,  would 
be  the  inevitable  alternative  and  would  be 
adopted  before  the  other  alternative  had  been 
attained.  But  it  must  be  to  the  management 
of  those  enormous  consolidations  a  grave  con- 
sideration how  they  can  give  such  latitude  to 
the  members  of  their  staff  as  will  produce  that 
healthy  self-reliance  which  comes  from  freedom 
of  speech  and  freedom  of  opinion,  without  en- 
dangering the  tremendous  financial  interests  for 


162  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

which  they  arc  responsible.  Whatever  individual 
difference  of  opinion  on  this  subject  there  may 
be  among  the  managers  of  the  great  industrial 
establishments,  there  is  not  any  difference  of 
opinion  in  the  country  at  large ;  and  public  opinion 
has  to  be  consulted.  Therefore,  would  it  not 
be  safer  and  better  for  the  interests  of  the  share- 
holders to  adopt  the  policy  of  freedom  which  I 
have  outlined,  and  thus  placate  the  public? 
For  the  growing  public  anxiety,  amounting  to 
animosity  and  suspicion,  against  our  big  corpora- 
tions would  be  allayed  if  it  were  apparent  that 
the  technical  officials  of  the  small  concern  had 
at  least  the  right  of  knowing  what  the  big  concern 
was  doing,  and  the  big  official  did  not  arrogate 
to  himself  the  possession  of  exclusive  knowl- 
edge and  exclusive  skill.  From  the  point  of 
view  of  public  policy,  the  question  is  one  well 
worthy  of  consideration;  for  it  is  coming  about 
that  not  only  railroads,  as  public  highways,  but 
all  large  corporations  utilizing  the  country's 
natural  products  and  converting  them  into  neces- 
sary objects  of  trade,  will  pass  under  closer 
legislative  scrutiny  and  public  criticism  in  the 
future  than  they  have  in  the  past — a  necessary 


Secrecy  in  the  Arts  163 

limitation,  which  will  become  more  exacting  the 
larger  the  corporations  grow — if  the  tendency 
to  growth  continues. 

While  unquestionably  dangers  can  be  foreseen 
as  arising  out  of  these  great  industrial  aggrega- 
tions— not  only  of  capital  but  of  industrial  energy 
— dangers  technical,  social,  and  political — there 
are  also  great  possibilities  of  good.  One  of  the 
benefits  may  justly  be  claimed  to  reside  in  the 
large  funds  that  are  thus  rendered  available  for 
technical  research,  from  which  the  public  derives 
benefit  indirectly,  even  if  the  results  are  not 
published.  But  if  we  could  banish  secrecy;  if 
every  industrial  establishment  of  any  magnitude, 
which  is  in  its  own  interest  carrying  on  technical 
research,  should  encourage  its  technical  staff 
to  confer  freely  with  the  members  of  every  other 
technical  staff,  the  sciences  and  arts  would  prog- 
ress far  more  rapidly  than  if  one  huge  organ- 
ization controlled  a  given  industry.  As  all  our 
principal  metallurgical  and  chemical  concerns 
have  laboratories,  and  carry  on  investigations 
and  make  experiments,  generally  on  a  large 
working  scale,  I  believe  the  advancement  of 
technological  science  is  better  attained  in  a 


164  Secrecy  in  the  Arts 

number  of  such  laboratories  than  if  there  were 
fewer  or  in  only  one.  There  is  keener  competi- 
tion of  wits  when  many  brains  are  working  inde- 
pendently. The  friction  of  honest  rivalry  is  a 
force  not  to  be  despised.  The  stimulus  of  am- 
bition is  sure  to  be  stronger  in  smaller  than  in 
large  consolidated  workshops.  The  air  in  such 
laboratories  is  freer  and  purer  than  when  men 
are  working  in  the  stifling  atmosphere  of  secrecy, 
or  even  in  great  public  state  establishments.  I 
believe  that  such  a  consolidation  of  mind  and 
high  impulses  would  carry  us  further  and  faster 
along  the  road  of  human  progress  than  all  the 
money  that  all  the  trusts  could  appropriate  for 
the  advancement  of  technical  knowledge. 


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11 


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12 


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Smith  (A.  W.)  and  Marx's  Machine  Design Svo,  3  00 

Smith's  (O.)  Press-working  of  Metals Svo,  3  00 

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13 


Thurston'*  Animal  as  a  Machine  and  Prime  Motor,  and  the  Laws  ot  Energetics. 

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Wood1.  Turbines 8vo,  2  50 


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•  Bovey's  Strength  of  Materials  and  Theory  of  Structures 8vo.  7  50 

Burr's  Elasticity  and  Resistance  of  the  Materials  of  Engineering 8vo,  7  50 

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Keep's  Cast  Iron 8vo,  2  50 

Lanza's  Applied  Mechanics 8vo,  7  50 

Maire's  Modern  Pigments  and  their  Vehicles 12mo,  2  00 

Martens'*  Handbook  on  Testing  Materials.     (Henning.) 8vo,  7  50 

Maurer's  Techincal  Mechanics 8vo,  4  00 

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Wood's  (De  V.)  Elements  of  Analytical  Mechanics 8vo,  3  00 

Treatise  on    the   Resistance   of   Materials   and    an    Appendix   on    the 

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Wood'*  (M.  P.)  Rustless  Coatings:    Corrosion  and  Electrolysis  of  Iron  and 

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14 


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15 


MEDICAL. 

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Davenirt1.  Statistical  Methods  with  Special  Reference  to  Biological  \ana- 

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Hammarsten's  Text-book  on  Physiological  Chemistry.     (Mandel.) 8vo,  4 

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La«a?Cohn'S  Practical  Urinary  Analysis.     (Lorenz.) 12mo.      '   ~» 

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Rostoski's  Serum  Diagnosis.     (Bolduan.) 12mo, 

Ruddiman's  Incompatibilities  in  Prescriptions 8vo, 

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Salkowski's  Physiological  and  Pathological  Chemistry.     (Orndorff.)  ..  ..8vo, 

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Ulke'i  Modern  Electrolytic  Copper  Refining 8vo, 

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16 


MINERALOGY. 

Baskerville's  Chemical  Elements.     (In  Preparation.). 

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*  Browning's  Introduction  to  the  Rarer  Elements 8vo.  1  60 

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Iddings's  Igneous  Rocks 8vo,  5  00 

Rock  Minerals 8vo,  5  00 

Johannsen's  Determination  of  Rock-forming  Minerals  in  Thin  Sections.  8vo, 

With  Thumb  Index  5  00 

*  Martin's  Laboratory     Guide    to    Qualitative    Analysis    with    the    Blow- 

pipe  12mo,  60 

Merrill's  Non-metallic  Minerals:  Their  Occurrence  and  Uses 8vo,  4  00 

Stones  for  Building  and  Decoration 8vo,  5  00 

*  Penfield's  Notes  on  Determinative  Mineralogy  and  Record  of  Mineral  Tests. 

8vo,  paper,  50 
Tables  of   Minerals,    Including  the  Use  of  Minerals  and  Statistics  of 

Domestic  Production 8vo,  1  00 

*  Pirsson's  Rocks  and  Rock  Minerals 12mo,  2  50 

*  Richards's  Synopsis  of  Mineral  Characters 12mo,  mor.  1   25 

*  Ries's  Clays :  Their  Occurrence,  Properties  and  Uses 8vo,  5  00 

*  Ries  and  Leighton's  History  of  the  Clay-working  Industry  of  the  United 

States 8vo,  2  50 

*  Tillman's  Text-book  of  Important  Minerals  and  Rocks 8vo,  2  00 

Washington's  Manual  of  the  Chemical  Analysis  of  Rocks 8vo,  2  00 


MINING. 

*  Beard's  Mine  Gases  and  Explosions Large  12mo, 

Boyd's  Map  of  Southwest  Virginia Pocket-book  form, 

*  Crane's  Gold  and  Silver 8vo, 

*  Index  of  Mining  Engineering  Literature 8vo, 

*  8vo,  mor. 

Douglas's  Untechnical  Addresses  on  Technical  Subjects 12mo, 

Eissler's  Modern  High  Explosives 8vo, 

Goesel's  Minerals  and  Metals:  A  Reference  Book 16mo,  mor. 

Ihlseng's  Manual  of  Mining 8vo, 

*  Iles's  Lead  Smelting 12mo, 

Peele's  Compressed  Air  Plant  for  Mines 8vo, 

Riemer's  Shaft  Sinking  Under  Difficult  Conditions.     (Corning  and  Peele).8vo, 

*  Weaver's  Military  Explosives 8vo, 

Wilson's  Hydraulic  and  Placer  Mining.     2d  edition,  rewritten 12mo, 

Treatise  on  Practical  and  Theoretical  Mine  Ventilation I2mo, 

17 


SANITARY   SCIENCE. 

Association  of  Sttte  and  National  Pood  and  Dairy  Departments,  Hartford 

Meeting.  MX* 8vo.  $300 

Jamestown  Meeting.  1907 8vo,     3  00 

•  Bashore's  Outlines  of  Practical  Sanitation 12mo.     1   25 

Sanitation  of  a  Country  House 12mo,  1  00 

Sanitation  of  Recreation  Camps  and  Parks 12mo,  1  00 

Polwell's  Sewerage.     (Designing,  Construction,  and  Maintenance.) 8vo,  300 

Water-supply  Engineering 8vo,  4  00 

Powter's  Sewage  Works  Analyses 12mo.  2  00 

Puertes  s  Water-filtration  Works 12mo,  2  50 

Water  and  Public  Health 12mo,  1  50 

Gerhard's  Guide  to  Sanitary  Inspections 12mo,  1  50 

•  Modern  Baths  and  Bath  Houses 8vo,  3  00 

Sanitation  of  Public  Buildings 12mo.  1  50 

Hasen's  Clean  Water  and  How  to  Get  It Large  12mo,  1  50 

Filtration  of  Public  Water-supplies 8vo.  3  00 

Kinnicut.  Winslow  and  Pratt's  Purification  of  Sewage.     (In  Preparation.) 
Leach's  Inspection  and  Analysis  of  Food  with  Special  Reference  to  State 

Control 8vo.  7  50 

Mason's  Examination  of  Water.     (Chemical  and  Bacteriological) 12mo,  1  25 

Water-supply.     (Considered  principally  from  a  Sanitary  Standpoint). 

8vo,  4  00 

•  Merriman's  Elements  of  Sanitary  Engineering 8vo,  2  00 

Ogden's  Sewer  Construction 8vo,  3  00 

Sewer  Design '. 12mo,     2  00 

Parsons's  Disposal  of  Municipal  Refuse 8vo,     2  00 

Prescott  and  Winslow's  Elements  of  Water  Bacteriology,  with  Special  Refer- 
ence to  Sanitary  Water  Analysis 12mo, 

•  Price's  Handbook  on  Sanitation 12mo, 

Richards's  Cost  of  Cleanness 1 2mo, 

Cost  of  Food.     A  Study  in  Dietaries 12mo, 

Cost  of  Living  as  Modified  by  Sanitary  Science. 12mo, 

Cost  of  Shelter 12mo, 

•  Richards  and  Williams's  Dietary'  Computer 8vo, 

Richards  and  Woodman's  Air,  Water,  and  Food  from  a  Sanitary  Stand- 
point  8vo, 

•  Richey's    Plumbers',     Steam-fitters',    and    Tinners'     Edition     (Building 

Mechanics'  Ready  Reference  Series) 16mo,  mor. 

Rideal's  Disinfection  and  the  Preservation  of  Food 8vo, 

Sewage  and  Bacterial  Purification  of  Sewage 8vo, 

Soper's  Air  and  Ventilation  of  Subways 12mo, 

Turneaure  and  Russell's  Public  Water-supplies 8vo, 

Venable's  Garbage  Crematories  in  America 8vo, 

Method  and  Devices  for  Bacterial  Treatment  of  Sewage 8vo,     3  00 

Ward  and  Whipple's  Freshwater  Biology.     (In  Press.) 

Whipple's  Microscopy  of  Drinking-water 8vo,     3  50 

•  Typhoid  Fever Large  12mo,     3  00 

Value  of  Pure  Water Large  12mo,     1  00 

Winslow's  Systematic  Relationship  of  the  Coccaceas Large  L2mo,     2  50 


MISCELLANEOUS. 

Emnxms't  Geological  Guide-book  of  the  Rocky  Mountain  Excursion  of  the 

International  Congress  of  Geologists Large  8vo. 

Perrel's  Popular  Treatise  on  the  Winds ...  8vo. 

Piugerald's  Boston  Machinist I8mo, 

Gannett'*  Statistical  Abstract  of  the  World.  .  .  .    24mo 

Haines's  American  Railway  Management ^mo! 

Hanausek  s  The  Microscopy  of  Technical  Products.     (Wtnton) 8vo. 

18 


Jacobs's  Betterment    Briefs.     A    Collection    of    Published    Papers   on    Or- 
ganized Industrial  Efficiency 8vo,  $3  50 

Metcalfe's  Cost  of  Manufactures,  and  the  Administration  of  Workshops.. 8vo,  5  00 

Putnam's  Nautical  Charts 8vo,  2  00 

Ricketts's  History  of  Rensselaer  Polytechnic  Institute  1824-1894. 

Large  12 mo.  3  00 

Rotherham's  Emphasised  New  Testament Large  8vo,  2  00 

Rust's  Ex-Meridian  Altitude,  Azimuth  and  Star-finding  Tables 8vo,  5  00 

Standage's  Decoration  of  Wood,  Glass,  Metal,  etc 12mo,  2  00 

Thome's  Structural  and  Physiological  Botany.     (Bennett) 16mo,  2  25 

Westermaier's  Compendium  of  General  Botany.     (Schneider) 8vo,  2  00 

Winslow's  Elements  of  Applied  Microscopy 12mo,  1  50 


HEBREW   AND    CHALDEE    TEXT-BOOOKS. 

Gesenius's  Hebrew  and  Chaldee  Lexicon  to  the  Old  Testament  Scriptures. 

(Tregelles.) Small  4to,  half  mor,     5  00 

Green's  Elementary  Hebrew  Grammar 12mo,     1  25 


19 


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